TEACHER BRINGS HOME MESSAGE ABOUT WATER
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THURSDAY, APRIL 17, 2014
New trial for tax evading ‘natural persons’
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Chilliwack
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CBC comedy all-star makes big laughs in Harrison. { Page A29 }
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Council supports unique ALR deal
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Developer will pay $6 million to build a berm to protect farmland
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{ See TAX, page A4 }
BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com Paul J. Henderson/TIMES
Kinder Morgan employees, led by Western Canadian Spill Services staff, lay a boom on the Fraser River as part of an oil spill emergency drill last Thursday.
Are we prepared? BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com
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o oil was released. No animals were affected. No water was contaminated. But the emergency response drill conducted last Friday by pipeline company Kinder Morgan at the Cheam First Nation beach on the Fraser River was a stark reminder of what could happen one day. “It’s a bit scary, the thought of a spill,” newly elected Cheam band councillor Darwin Douglas told the Times. “It would be devastating for our community, but all the more reason that exercises like Thursday’s are important.” Douglas, like many Cheam band members, spends a good portion of his summer fishing in the Fraser River. Four years ago approximately 30 million sockeye
Emergency response drills like the one held last week are good, but plan for wildlife still lacking
returned to the river and even more are expected this year. A spill of crude oil into the Fraser could prove disastrous for the nutritional and cultural mainstay of his and other Sto:lo bands. “We live down there during the summer,” Douglas said of the spot on the river where Kinder Morgan set up for the drill. “We camp out there. It definitely raises a lot of concern and even after the exercise yesterday, community members started asking questions. “There is a lot at stake here.” The exercise on the beach involved local First Nations,
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he long-running saga of a Chilliwack man convicted of tax evasion continues this month. Russell Anthony Porisky racked up $274,000 in missed income taxes and GST through claiming status as a “natural person, working at his own capacity, under a private contract, for his own benefit.” Porisky was convicted of three charges in his 2012 trial and sentenced to a total of four-and-a-half years in jail. However, this past Monday a Court of Appeal Judge ruled that both Porisky and his partner Elaine EB IRST Gould were entiFirst reported on tled to a new trial. chilliwacktimes.com The original convictions are still on the table. Porisky and Gould were behind Paradigm Education, a tax evasion school in which they taught over 800 students to claim to be “natural persons.” The resulting total tax evasion is estimated at around $11 million. Roughly two-thirds of Paradigm students paid a percentage of their income, while the remaining third paid a fixed rate to the school, which Porisky and Gould ran out of their home. After failing to attend a November 2011 jury selection, the couple’s eventual appearance in court was wrought with confusion, ultimately resulting in this month’s ruling for a retrial.
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police, Kent/Harrison Search and Rescue, the SPCA, CP Rail, wildlife recovery people and spill response experts. The Kinder Morgan employees were led by trainer Michael Locke from Western Canadian Spill Services, an Alberta company that specializes in oil spill cleanup. Thursday’s oil response practice was one of about 15 such training sessions Kinder Morgan conducts annually to ensure it’s ready in the unlikely worst-case scenario of an oil spill.
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{ See SPILL, page A11 }
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I
t may be hard to fathom how anyone could support an application to remove 17.6 hectares (ha) of prime farmland out of the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) to build an industrial park. But what if that application comes with the landowner’s promise to pay millions of dollars to build a berm to protect nearly nine times as much agricultural land threatened by flooding elsewhere? That’s what Chilliwack city council considered at Tuesday’s meeting, and decided to forward the application to the Agricultural Land Commission (ALC) with support. To offset the loss of farmland in the ALR, the applicant, local developer Peter Kingma (Homecraft Construction and Wilmark Homes), has agreed to spend as much as $6 million to build a low elevation berm on the Fraser River to protect the 156 ha of the Carey Point area of the city from flooding. “At the end of the day, this is something that will be beneficial to the City of Chilliwack,” Coun. Ken Huttema said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We may lose a bit of agricultural land, but it definitely improves the quality and potential of the Carey Point lands and hopefully that puts that area of concern to rest for many years to come.” { See LAND, page A3 }
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