My Sudanese friend Lubna Abdelrahman is a very enterprising lady.

In the last 18 months, she has set up an organisation to help immigrant women and their families and is also busy writing articles for and promoting the new Alqalam Arabic newspaper in the Vancouver area.

Lubna Abdelrahman speaking at Edmonds School, Burnaby, BC (Pix by Richard Greenwood)

Kathy Corrigan, MLA for Burnaby-Deer Lake (Pix by Richard Greenwood)

One of the guest speakers, Burnaby-Deer Lake MLA Kathy Corrigan, told the audience that even though Canadians believed in equality, Canadian women still only made two-thirds the money that men did.

As a result, it was even more important to encourage immigrant women and their families and help them settle into their new country effectively, she added.

Lubna described new workshops she is setting up to help women with a Middle Eastern, Sudanese or Somalian background set up new businesses and learn more about financial institutions in Canada.

“I know it’s very hard. Most new businesses don’t know how to sell their products. You are not alone. We will try to help you,” she said.

Lubna worked for the Ministry of Health for UNICEF in Sudan before moving to Burnaby, B.C. with her husband more than 10 years ago.

Since then, she has worked as an outreach worker, community health worker, program coordinator, translator and hosted numerous workshops. She is also kept busy raising two young daughters.

Bitmakaly Women’s Association (also known as Bitmakaly Women’s Empowerment Organization) can also be contacted on 778-919-1208 or via their Facebook site.

Eulachon picture courtesy of NOAA

Everybody loves a good storyteller and I’m no exception.

Last week, I listened to some of the live streaming of the Enbridge hearings from Kitimaat, the First Nations village a few clicks outside the company town of Kitimat in northwest B.C.

It was the tail end of the first day and the Haisla’s Chief Councillor, Ellis Ross, was telling how Kitimaat was founded and the stories of betrayal over the years.

Now I’ve been to nearby Kitimat, and my memories are of a blue-collar town dominated by the blazing hot furnaces inside Alcan (now Rio Tinto Alcan);  the Eurocan Pulp and Paper mill spewing God knows what (now closed); and touring around Methanex  (also closed).  To be honest, I never even saw the native Indian village, on the east side of the Douglas Channel.

I’ve always known Kitimat and nearby Prince Rupert as shippers of the “dangerous and the dirty”.  If Enbridge has its way, shipping bitumen and condensate through the long fiords embracing the Northwest Coast will continue that tradition, managing to combine the  worst of both worlds: the dangerous (for the environment) and the dirty (heavy oil).

But Chief Ellis Ross and other members of the Haisla Nation took us back eloquently to the time before the “dangerous and the dirty”, before pollution wiped out the eulachon runs and when whales chased herring all the way up the Douglas Channel.

Here are three short stories from the testimony of Chief Ellis Ross, from the past, the recent past, and a possible future. His dad’s hereditary title was Haanatlenok, the founder of Kitamaat and it was a place no one wanted to live in at first, in the old days, he told the hearing.

“Everybody else is terrified to come to this territory. “Why? Because there’s a monster living at the head of the Kitimat River. Everybody knows it so everybody clears away from here, steers away.

 

“Well, Waa-mis and his hunting party are the only ones brave enough to come here and check it out and they find out it’s not a monster.

 

“It’s thousands upon thousands of seagulls all rising in unison every time an eulachon run goes up the river and then landing again to feed on the eulachon. That’s what everybody thought was a monster.

 

“I can’t imagine that. If there’s thousands upon thousands of seagulls doing that at a distance of maybe greater than seven miles viewing it, imagine how much eulachon was in the river that those seagulls are feeding on.”

Eulachons, or oolichans, are small fish with a really  high oil content that are an important part of the First Nations diet and heritage.

Here’s one of his Chief Ellis’s less happy stories, that came from when he was working for a marine company out of Kitimat trying to clean up a small oilspill.

 ”A tugboat down at one of the docks sank, dumping all its diesel into the water,” he recalled.

 

“Well, we were called in, because we were the representative for Burrard Spill (a spill response company) for our region. Optimal conditions; the water’s calm, you’re working off the dock, you got every gear that you can think of, you can pack it down.

 

“We still couldn’t pick that diesel up. In fact, most of it got under the dock and it took a year for it to all leech out, but we spent a couple days down there trying to do what we could, basically mopping it up.

 

“When we were done with the absorbent pads and booms, the first thing we found out is that, actually, nobody wanted to deal with that product.

 

“Our company had an agreement with the pulp and paper mill to burn the product in their furnace, natural gas furnace, so the higher-ups agreed to it, but when we got to the door, their workers refused us.

 

“So we were stuck outside the pulp and paper mill with these bags and bags of booms and absorbent pads. So they came down with a condition. You guys can burn it in our furnace, but you guys have got to pack it up there yourselves.

 

“So covered in diesel, soaking wet, stink, and nobody wanted to come near us, we had to do it ourselves. Nobody would touch that.”

The Eurocan pulp and paper mill closed down in 2010 and since then, the herring and the whales have started to come back to Douglas Channel. Here’s Chief Ellis’s third story, from just last year:

“Last summer around midnight during the summer I could hear a whale. Now, I spent a better part of 10 years getting close to whales on my charter boat job, so I understood how to get close to humpbacks and great whales and killer whales.

 

“Well, midnight I hear this whale and it’s right outside the soccer field.  So my wife’s house is right down the soccer field, it’s waterfront, but I can hear this whale, and I can’t understand why it’s so close. Something’s got to be wrong.

 

“So I walk down there with my daughter, my youngest daughter, and I try to flash a light down there, and quickly figured out it’s not in trouble, it’s sleeping. It’s resting right outside our soccer field.

 

“You can’t imagine what that means to a First Nation’s that’s watched his territory get destroyed over 60 years. You can’t imagine the feeling. Then to see a herring run return.

 

“And not based on anything we’d done. There’s nothing that the federal government did that brought that back. There’s nothing that we did as a First Nations that brought that back. It was just a simple exercise of closing an effluent mill that was dumping a product that shouldn’t have been dumped in the first place.

 

“And how did they get there? Well they promised that there’d be lots of jobs. Well that didn’t work out too well. They promised there’d be no negative impact on the environment. That worked out worse than the jobs promise did.

 

“It’s a cliché to make promises and then break it to First Nations, but in our territory it happened over and over and over again.

He concluded his testimony against Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Project this way:

“At the very least, the very least, in assessing this project, please, just don’t regard Haisla as just this collateral damage ensuring that this product gets to Asia. Don’t just consider the economics.

 

Take what you’ve heard here. Take their pain and their emotions and apply that to your decision-making. Apply it like it was happening to your own family. Apply it like it’s your heritage because, quite frankly, it is.”

See my earlier posts:

* Enbridge releases tanker plans for Kitimat

* What if a tanker heading for Kitimat hit another vessel

* What if a containership ran aground on Nootka Island

* Tug escort rules vary in B.C.

(Posted by Alison Bate on January 21, 2012)

June 22, 2011

I was working the evening shift at The Vancouver Sun the night the first hockey riot broke out.

Depressed about the Canucks losing, we’d just about finished laying out the front page and “put the paper to bed”. Then news came in that a mob was forming at Robson and Thurlow, with drunken fans climbing lampposts and breaking windows.

It was June 14, 1994, and as assistant design editor, I was responsible for laying out the front page and selecting and editing the pictures the photographers brought back. We were still using negatives, then, of course, peering over them carefully with a loupe, selecting the sharpest and the best.

As the night wore on, we stripped apart the front page and inside pages to add more and more dramatic photos of the rioters and the riot police. We worked flat out until 1:30 a.m., doing a triple chaser for the paper.

Media photographers and broadcasters were really the only ones at the riot scene in 1994 and our negatives showed people climbing lampposts, wrecking and looting stores, and assaulting police officers.

That night, we didn’t really have time to analyze the reasons for the riot, or even the consequences of having captured evidence of people committing crimes.

But the next day, I remember how protective we felt about the negatives, and how we even considered hiding them. In our department, we didn’t want to hand them over to the police. We were worried that it would turn our photographers into targets for criminals in the future and also wanted to protect the civil liberties of those photographed, even those committing crimes. That time, the riot police seemed to have charged in aggressively, as well, and we didn’t quite trust the police not to massage their own role in the riot.

I’m sure there was also a less appealing competitive ego aspect to it too: they were OUR negatives.

Of course, the police did come calling, demanding that The Vancouver Sun hand over negatives from that night. “Not without a court order,” our managing editor at the time said, and we were all pleased.

The police came back with signed bits of paper, and the negatives were dutifully handed over in the end. I felt indignant and uncomfortable at the time, and had a good rant. “So much for media freedom. Is this a police state we’re living in? How dare they? “ etc., etc.

Seventeen years later, we have another riot but this time everyone is falling over themselves to name and shame the culprits. The Province even ran pages of pictures of the culprits, the police phone number and a story: “Do the right thing and report the rioters.

I’m not quite sure why I feel so uncomfortable about all this naming and shaming. Maybe it’s because it feels hypocritical, and maybe it’s because I feel there should be a healthy distance between the police and its citizens.

My second thought is that very few of those doing the naming and shaming are 100 per cent innocent themselves. And that includes myself.

I happened to be biking back through the downtown after teaching near Terminal and Main last Wednesday, shortly after the game finished. Police had closed my usual route over the Dunsmuir viaduct, so I went along Pender and cut up Homer to find my bus stop.

“Don’t go that way, there’s tear gas,” one of the bystanders told me. I headed up to Granville anyway and walked along to The Bay, surrounded by the crowds and looking at the huge black spire of smoke from burning cars in amazement.

It was very different seeing a riot live, and not via a negative loupe while inspecting negatives safely inside the Vancouver Sun building. But you know what? As riots go, it was a pretty tame event compared with the Brixton riots in London, which I covered as a journalist in the 1980s. I didn’t really feel threatened for my safety last week, and just gave a wide berth to any idiots looking for trouble.

Around each small group of troublemakers, a huge crowd had developed, enjoying excellent free theatre. Virtually everyone was taking photos and videos and these are the photos being used now to name and shame the culprits. These same people chose to stay and watch.

I walked with my bike down to Dunsmuir again to avoid the crowds. And one block away from the rioting, everything was peaceful. So I know that anyone who wanted to escape the rioting, could do so easily.

Back on Granville, the bus stops had incredible line-ups, so I gave up waiting for a bus and biked over to West Vancouver, passing numerous couples and groups of friends doing the same thing, all wearing hockey sweaters and enjoying the end of the day. By the time I arrived in West Vancouver, it was as though nothing had happened, apart from the crowded buses.

Overall, the riot was a spectacle, and I enjoyed being at the scene of live news, at the centre of things. I always do. I’d like to think I’m 100 per cent innocent of causing trouble that night, but maybe it’s more like 90 or 95 per cent. I understand the allure of being in a crowd and if I’d been younger, I might have stayed to watch longer and take some stunning photos, too. As it was, I felt simply sad at what was happening to my city.

And that brings me to my third point: I think one of the reasons why most of us feel so sad about the riot is that it broke the unspoken contract between the city, the police and ourselves. The contract that says we’ll let you have fun if you behave yourself. The Vancouver police and other agencies handled the Olympic crowds so well, and were models of restraint this time around, and we didn’t fulfil our end of the bargain.

The bottom line is, we can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

Feb. 27, 2010

By Alison Bate

It’s Saturday morning and my sister Gill and I are hanging out over coffee in my little cottage, listening to the rain beating overhead and enjoying being dry again.

Yesterday we spent the day up Cypress Mountain watching the women’s snowboarding live at the Olympics.

Huge buses from California took us up the local mountain; all of us ready to sit in the rain, the fog and the wind for five hours. We waited in a plastic warming hut for a couple of hours, reading the papers and chatting with a Seattle couple, before climbing up endless stairs to the giant stand.

The whole day was like sailing in winter – revelling in getting cold and wet while having a great time. By the end of the day, instead of bums on seats, there were bags on seats: all of us in the stands wearing billowing see-through plastic bags over our clothes…not exactly a fashion statement.

The Europeans were the main stars in the parallel giant slalom (our event), and in the end, a Dutch woman came first, followed by a Russian, and an Austrian. The Dutch were standing on the benches cheering madly when she won.

It was all very exciting though, especially at the end, with the knockout stages. Canada had a couple of faint hopes, but I managed to be taking a pee break when the best Canadian hope had her run (as Gill kept pointing out afterward!).

Marching down the road to the dock, Bowen Islanders prepare for the Olympic torch ceremonies the day before the big event.

It was dark and sleepy as I drove down to Snug Cove at 5:30 a.m. yesterday, but every house had its lights on.

I parked the car, offloaded my bike and pedalled across the cool damp field to Snug Cove. I passed walkers with their headlights on as I trundled across the boardwalk and left it outside the library.

“It’s like waiting for the bus,” I heard, as I stood outside the library, surrounded in the dark by hundreds of fellow islanders, many wearing red and white or the Olympic red mittens – none of which showed in the dark. It was chilly, and we were all huddled up, waiting for something to happen.

“Ooh, there it is,” and we looked up the road to see an orange wobbly flame, with a huge crowd of people walking behind it, ghosts in the dark. “Why are there two flames?” asked someone in the crowd. The flame or flames seemed to disappear from view somewhere near the General Store, and we resumed our waiting-for-the-bus positions.

Watching the torch go by on Bowen Island

“Thank You, Bowen!” said Murray Atherton, as he praised us for the magnificent turnout and urged us not to block the ferry traffic.

The Olympic entourage then took back stage as the huge crowd all turned to watch the commuter cars load endlessly onto the Queen of Cap for the 6:30 a.m. run. A very Bowen-y moment.

On the Dallas dock, standing on the rail, it was hard to see everything, but the Olympic flame was sucked back into something else and taken onto the ferry. We sang “O Canada” rather lamely and then Lorne Warr launched into his new song “Back to the Island again”.

Watched by more than a thousand people, the Queen of Capilano left the dock, prettily framing the foreground, the lights of Cypress Mountain on the North Shore in the background, and dawn started to break. That was the Kodak moment.

And then it was all over and I went and had my usual coffee and oatmeal muffin at the Snug.