Chilliwack Times, April 16, 2015

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SUPERBOX SUPER LAME AS THIEVES CRACKING THEM ALL OVER THE CITY Soon all of Chilliwack will be facing the same futile battle

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times

Sweet, solo, Sarah . . . what could be better in the a.m.?

Chilliwack

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THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2015

› Cover Story

25.7% - the increase in the Canadian population reaching 100 years old

* Source: 2011 Census

@chilliwacktimes

Statistics say more of us than ever before will have a 100th birthday

BY GREG LAYCHAK glaychak@chilliwacktimes.com

80,000 - the number of predicted centenarians by 2061

4,870 - are women

/chilliwacktimes

The Century Club

➤ FAST FACTS

5,825 - people aged 100 years and older in Canada

{ Page A27 }

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chilliwacktimes.com

“If you ask me, ‘What is your secret?’ I have no secret, just luck that I have lived that long and am still able to walk a little bit.”

with colour. “I didn’t expect to be living up to 100, that’s for sure,” Choon said in his living room the day before his birthday. “If you ask me, ‘What is your secret?’ I have no secret, just luck that I lived that long and am still able to walk a little bit.” And walk he does. The garden he tends to is his way to “keep on moving,” which is his advice for those seeking to live a long life. Motion it seems, has always played a significant role in Choon’s life. Originally born in Malaysia (known then as British Malaya) during the First World War, he made his way to Canada by way of China and the U.S. Leaving his family’s rubber plantation in Malaysia before the Second World War, Choon attended medical school in Canton where he graduated in 1941.

{ See CENTURY, page A4 }

Paul J. Henderson/TIMES

A memorial plaque for Adam Burchart on a bench in Mountview Park in Sardis.

No time could heal this crime Forgiveness abounds in tragic teen death, but driver has little for himself BY PAUL J. HENDERSON phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com

T

wo of Ryan Potts’s friends were laughing and high-fiving in the box of the pickup truck he drove down a country road in Yarrow on a warm summer night in 2013. A third friend was in the cab of the truck with the then 18-year-old. The four teenagers were engaged in nothing more than the typical hijinx of teenaged life just a couple months after high school graduation. It wasn’t safe but it wasn’t unusual, for teenagers. And while even a provincial court judge deemed the driving to be at the low end of dangerous behaviour, the night ended with 18-year-old Adam Burchart falling out of the back of the truck. He hit his head on Boundary Road and died at the scene. Potts was charged with dangerous driving causing death, and was sentenced in Chilliwack Court last week. It was a unique sentencing hearing where Crown, defence and the judge all urged Potts to get counselling, not to overcome anger or substance abuse issues as is often seen in court, but to deal with his own grief. “This was not a situation where Mr. Potts was drunk,

{ See POTTS, page A16 }

6894851

- Choon Law, a Chilliwack resident who turned 100 in late March

E

arly in March, a Chilliwack resident with a rich life history entered a landmark club. On the first Friday of the month Choon Law celebrated his 100th birthday with family in Vancouver, joining the ranks of a growing segment of the Canadian demographic landscape. Choon, who was a doctor, was known in Chilliwack for his work in tuberculosis treatment at the Coqualeetza (Qw’oqw’elith’a) Methodist hospital during a time when the disease ran rampant in First Nations lands. Now a century old, he shuffles around his home as the early spring weather prepares his azaleas and rhododendron to fill his garden

{ Page A3 }

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