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Old-school fun
Grade 6 and 7 students from I'ecole Heather Park race in a soap box derby on Tuesday. There were 10 cars in the race, built by the students in teams of four. They each received a turn racing the cars down a slope behind Kelly Road secondary school.
MLA promoting online petitions
Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca
Burnaby-Lougheed MLA Jane Shin has now seen more of northern B.C.’s backroads and whistlestops than many longtime regional residents. She’s got the dust on the Fiat to prove it.
She’s driving the highways of the north, but also heading onto the gravel byways, to reach the residents who would most benefit from a bill she introduced in the Legislature.
It seeks to allow online petitions instead of just the paper ones, as many other jurisdictions in Canada and internationally have already done. It would speed up delivery of such petitions, be more accountable (it’s harder to fake a name on an online petition and easier to verify questionable signatories), and let rural people be in touch with petitionable causes better than the current system, which indirectly insists on people signing their name on a piece of paper. This means petitions have to be made door-to-door or in public places like retail stores and info tables at social gatherings.
“This is non-contentious, non-con-troversial, and all it aims to do is make governing the province better, by being in better touch with the people of the province,” the NDP MLA said during a quick stop in Prince George before heading off to Mackenzie, Chetwynd, Dawson Creek and beyond.
Bill M-211 is called the Electronic Petitions Act. She has introduced it three times in the past series of House sittings, but so far it has died on the schedule before reaching completion when the session closed.
“It is about people far away from Victoria having an equal say, an equal chance to engage in public discussions that matter to them,” she said. “It will also get more people involved in those discussions more often. People have families to look after, they are volunteering in their communities, they are working long hours, and that doesn’t leave you much time or energy to get into public issues. This way, you can get involved right at home, with a few clicks. On the surface
CITIZEN PHOTO BY FRANK PEEBLES
Burnaby-Lougheed MLA Jane Shin was in Prince George on a tour of the north drawing awareness to her bill that would legalize online petitions.
of things, it looks like people are more and more disengaged from the issues of the day and aren’t participating in government, but people care very much. There are barriers. I want to remove one of them, and it is so cheap and easy to do. And it benefits everyone, it doesn’t matter what your political stripe might be.”
Southern and urban people have computers too, so the electronic petition concept isn’t exclusionary of them, but Shin said the more rural the resident or the more distant the community from Victoria, the more the technologies of today are supposed to be a tool. Even the flickering bars on her cell phone tell her this is not the reality, as she drives through large zones of dead air where no mobile phone or internet coverage exists. The electronic petition legislation is no antidote to these gaps in coverage but it does help underscore these ironic holes in the communications infrastructure of the province.
“Rural communities are expected to cough up the resources and do all the heavy work to pay the bills for B.C. to live, but then they should also get services like cell phone coverage and high-speed internet at the very least in
exchange for that. Education, safety, business, public discussion, contact with the general world is done so easily in these ways, and it is the rural resident who is best served by those tools. So where are they? It is very disrespectful to not address that problem. Again, this is not a partisan issue, it is about all of us who are elected to govern paying attention to the issues that affect us all, and provide solutions.”
Shin is not a single-issue traveller, either. She is happy to discuss another bill she has on the books in Victoria.
She introduced Bill M-215, the Business Practices and Consumer Protection (Money Transfers) Amendment Act. This seeks to cap the fees a money broker can charge for international money transactions, and insists they mark that fee as a line item so consumers can tell who has the best (and worst) rates. Right now those fees are being called predatory, and the actual amount is sometimes hidden inside an overall transaction record.
“I’d love to hear from anyone remitting money on a regular basis,” she said, and added, as she lives up to her online communication challenge, “I’m just an email away.”
She can be reached at J.Shin@leg.bc.ca.
Weekend expected to break heat records
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
Record-breaking heat is possible by the time the weekend rolls around.
The daytime high is expected to reach 29 C on Saturday and then 30 on Sunday and Monday, according to an Environment Canada five-day forecast issued Tuesday.
“If that persists, we’re looking at daily records for those days,” said Environment Canada meteorologist Andre Besson.
The record for June 27 is 28.5 C, set in 1992, and for June 28 it’s 28.3 C, set in 1950.
Besson said the heat is courtesy of an upper ridge of high pressure that will build from the south and will move northward.
It’s expected to deliver temperatures in the 40 C range in the province’s lower latitudes.
It should make for great swimming in local lakes but Besson urged people to make sure they’re well hydrated.
He also noted there is a chance of showers on today and Thursday and with that could come lightning. With the heat to follow, that could add up to a recipe for forest fires.
Jillian Kelsh, the information officer for the Wildfire Management Branch’s Prince George Fire Centre, said there is currently no plan for a fire ban on the weekend but urged campers to be careful.
That includes making sure their campfires are truly out before leaving a spot and not lighting them in the first place if it’s windy.
Kelsh said patrol flights will be taken to keep an eye out for any “holdover” fires sparked by lightning and staying alive in the hot, dry conditions to follow.
“Normally, in the heat of the day, once the fire has kind of had a chance to start burning, that’s normally when we can find them,” Kelsh said.
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