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CITIZEN
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
Isabelle Hampson, 15, uses a distracted driving simulator during the PARTY program at UHNBC on Thursday.
Simulator brings home dangers of texting and driving
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Some future drivers got an idea Thursday of just how hard it is to text and drive at the same time with the help of a video-based simulator.
Between the touchy controls and the voice of an annoying passenger who refuses to wear his seatbelt, things were already difficult for even the most experienced drivers, let alone a class of Grade 10 students from Nechako Valley secondary school in Vanderhoof.
But once the smartphone popped up on the touch screen, all bets were off.
Drivers were swerving off the road, going in the wrong direction and running into other vehicles. It was also a good thing the pedestrians and dogs were virtual rather than real.
Within five minutes, most drivers had too many strikes against them to carry on.
The lesson, said the Insurance Corporation of B.C.’s road safety
coordinator Diana Pozer, is simply don’t text and drive. Refrain from turning the smartphone on while in your vehicle in the first place, or get a passenger to be the texter.
“Anything to avoid using your phone while you’re driving,” Pozer said.
The experience drove home that message for Isabella Hampson and Sadie Dupuis, both 15 years old and six months to a year away from becoming old enough to take the test for a learners licence.
“I’m not going to use my phone because that’s just too hard,” Hampson said.
Likewise, Dupuis said she discovered just how much damage can be done by someone who texts and drives at the same time. “The injuries that you can get,” Dupuis said.
Distracted driving is the second leading cause of car crash fatalities in B.C. according to ICBC.
Those caught texting, e-mailing or holding a cellphone or other hand-held electronic device while driving are subject to a $167 fine
and three penalty points. And drivers in the novice stage of the graduated licensing program must restart the 24-month novice period after getting their licence back.
Also drivers who endanger others because of any distraction, including using a hand-held or hands-free device, could be charged with careless driving under the Motor Vehicle Act, or even dangerous driving under the Criminal Code. Both charges carry heavy fines and penalties.
The simulator, which was set up in a conference room at UHNBC, was brought in through the Preventing Alcohol and Risk Related Trauma in Youth (PARTY) program.
Put on by the Prince George Safe Attitudes and Actions Society, a volunteer group, the program typically includes a tour of the hospital’s emergency department, morgue, intensive care unit and chapel with presentations from physicians, paramedics, nurses and injury survivors.
David FRIEND
The Canadian Press
TORONTO — What began with Target Corp. bursting into Canada with confidence over its prospects has quickly spiralled into billions of dollars in losses and a decision by the discount retailer to scamper back to the United States.
Less than two years after opening its first stores in Canada, the Minneapolis-based company has admitted defeat in the Canadian market, saying Thursday that it could not see turning a profit here for at least another six years - a lifetime in the retail industry.
Target will close 133 stores across the country by early June, with 17,600 employees losing their jobs. Target has a store in Pine Centre Mall in Prince George.
“We have not realized the significant improvement in Canadian consumer sentiment that we believe is necessary,” Target chief ex-
CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN
The Target store in Pine Centre Mall in Prince George.
ecutive Brian Cornell told analysts years weighing its entry into
during a conference call.
“Put simply, we have not seen the step-change in performance we told you we needed to see.” Target spent more than five
Canada before making the move to acquire most of the real estate assets operated by Zellers back in 2010.
— see CLOSURES, page 5
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UNBC faculty taking strike vote
Samantha WRIGHT ALLEN
Citizen staff sallen@pgcitizen.ca
The University of Northern B.C. Faculty Association has called on its members to give it a strike mandate for the negotiating table.
Voting started Thursday on Prince George and Terrace campuses, and faculty can also mail in votes until the end of next week, said association vice-president Erik Jensen.
Jensen said it’s important they come to the next negotiations with a majority of faculty in support of the potential for escalating action.
“A strong mandate vote will have weight at the negotiating table. We want to have the ability to say ‘Look we’re really serious about negotiating to a successful conclusion.”
Jensen said negotiations started last spring and in the fall both sides turned to a labour relations mediator “to jump start the negotiations.”
“Even that process only took us a certain distance and frankly got nowhere on our key goals in this round of negotiations,” said Jensen, which are improving post retirement benefits, salary structure, and program redundancy, a situation where the university could potentially layoff faculty for non-financial reasons.
“UNBC is consistently rated as one of the top small university in Canada,” said Jensen, pointing to the university’s recent second-place finish in Maclean’s university rankings.
“But our salary structure puts us about 20 per cent below our comparator small universities in Canada.
“We’re really worried about being able to retain excellent
mUNBC is consistently rated as one of the top small university in Canada. But our salary structure puts us about 20 per cent below our comparator small universities in Canada.
— Erik Jensen
faculty.”
The association voted unanimously to put the vote to members just before Christmas, which Jensen said helped move some issues in a positive direction.
The group sat down with the university Board of Governors last weekend and the next round of negotiations are from Jan. 23 to 25.
This will be the first collective agreement for the faculty, which unionized in the spring of 2014 with a 90 per cent vote, said Jensen. The university has almost 400 faculty members, according to its website, of which 194 are full-time and 204 are part-time.
The union will have a 90 day window, should it get a strike mandate, to implement some form of strike action, which Jensen said they are not taking lightly.
“We’re really concerned about the possible impact that this could have on the students should it come to [a strike] and so that’s something that we’re really weighing very carefully in our minds as we move forward.”
Grow-op charges thrown out
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff
The case against a man accused of illegally growing and selling marijuana in the Prince George area has been thrown out after a B.C. Supreme Court Justice found the Crown took too long to bring the matter to trial.
Quang Phuoc Truong, 44, was arrested in Prince George on Oct. 27, 2010 but as of Thursday, the matter had not yet gone to trial. Much of a reasons for judgment from Justice Ron Tindale focused on a mixup over where Truong actually lived and then efforts that were described as “minimal at best” to serve him a summons to appear in court.
Even before then, there was trouble.
Released on a promise to appear following his arrest, Truong showed up on Feb. 27, 2011 for a hearing in Prince George provincial court only to learn charges had not been laid, and it was another month before that step had been completed.
Truong was a no show at subsequent hearings and by September 2011, police determined he had moved away from Prince George to an “unknown location” and a warrant for Truong’s arrest was issued.
However, Truong’s driver’s licence clearly stated he lived in Prince Rupert. Eventually, RCMP
in that city did attempt to deliver a summons to Truong but gave up too easily in Tindale’s opinion.
Although no one answered the door it was noted that on two occasions, the home’s lights were on, and a truck was in the driveway on another.
RCMP in Prince Rupert eventually found Truong and arrested him in October 2013. After three days in custody, he was released and attended all the subsequent hearings in Prince George. But there were further delays due to a lack of transcripts for several of the hearings.
By July 2014, Truong had secured a lawyer, Ben Levine, and a trial in B.C. Supreme Court without a preliminary hearing was scheduled for March. In the interim, Levine also applied to have the case stayed because of the delays.
Tindale concluded the Crown was responsible for 29 of the 46 months the case would have been before the court by the time the trial had started. Under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it should ideally take no longer than 18 months from the time charges are laid to get a case to trial.
Details on the grow op were not provided but it was alleged Truong was found with more than three kilograms of marijuana at the time of his arrest.
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