Prince George Citizen January 12, 2019 by Prince George Citizen

Come on down – The Price is Right still going strong WORKLIFE 16

Saturday, January 12, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916

CITIZEN PHOTO BY BRENT BRAATEN

Baby chameleon Tracy Calogheros, CEO of The Exploration Place, introduces the museum’s newest addition to the Biome Gallery – a baby panther chameleon. He is settling in to his new environment in the gallery. He will grow to be about 30 cm long. He does not have a name yet, but the public is encouraged to drop off suggestions. The winning suggestion will be selected by a vote, and the person making the suggestion will receive a free membership to The Exploration Place.

Sentence upheld for molester Citizen staff

CITIZEN FILE PHOTO

A lawsuit by John Brink, president of Brink Forest Products Limited, against BCR Properties has been dismissed.

Brink’s lawsuit dismissed Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca A long-running legal battle between Prince George lumber manufacturer John Brink and BCR Properties Ltd. over the state of the site where he had planned to build a sawmill has come to an end. A consent dismissal order was filed Dec. 12 stating that the proceeding be dismissed without costs to any party and that the dismissal is “for all purposes of the same force and effect as if judgment had been pronounced after a hearing of this action on its merits.” The order is signed by the lawyers representing Brink and BCR Properties. The matter – a dispute over the condition of a property at 1077 Boundary Rd. in the BCR Industrial Site – had been set to go to trial this past Monday and was to last 44 days, according to a trial brief submitted by BCR Properties. Consent dismissal orders are typically issued when the plaintiff has decided there is no chance of getting a favourable judgment or the parties have reached an out of court settlement. Neither Brink nor BCR Properties returned phone calls from The Citizen for requests for comment. However, a land title search shows the property was trans-

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ferred to a new owner – a numbered company with the same River Road address where Brink Forest Products Ltd. is located – on Dec. 11, the day before the order was filed at the courthouse in Prince George. The market value was $1.5 million, according to a transfer document. Brink had been leasing the site with an option to purchase. In mid-2005, Brink had started construction of a new sawmill at the site. With the region’s forests awash in beetle-killed pine, time was of the essence and the aim was to have the operation up and running quickly. Within six months, Brink had constructed the foundations and the mill’s superstructure and had installed a number of machines with the intent to start processing logs by the coming winter. But then the worked stopped and in 2009 the first of a series of lawsuits was filed in a dispute over the property’s fair value. Brink had claimed BCR Properties neglected to inform him the site included a 22-acre landfill containing a number of toxic substances. He alleged it effectively reduced the amount of land that could be used for the mill to 60 acres from the expected 100 and that it would cost $12.75 million to remediate the site. BCR Properties had denied all the allegations.

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A man found guilty of molesting a young girl will have to serve his sentence in jail after the B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed an application to have it served as a conditional sentence order. The appeal by Michael Scott Horswill was dismissed Friday, about 1 1/2 months after the Supreme Court of Canada denied his application to have the verdict overturned. In January 2016, following a five-day trial, Horswill was found guilty of molesting the four-yearold daughter of a family friend in July 2013 while they were staying overnight at a cabin near Prince George. In the process of sentencing Horswill, the judge was asked to ignore the mandatory minimum of at least one year in jail. In November 2016, an Ontario Superior Court Justice struck down the mandatory minimum for a man convicted of the same offence and sentenced

him to seven months in jail followed by two years probation. But in December 2016, B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams rejected Horswill’s application and a month later sentenced him to 14 months in jail followed by 30 months probation. His name was also added to the national sex offender registry for 20 years. In the most recent decision, the Court of Appeal agreed with Horswill’s counsel’s argument that Williams erred in his conclusion that the mandatory minimum imposed by the Criminal Code was constitutional. But the Court of Appeal nonetheless found he did not err in concluding on the facts of the case that a conditional sentence order was not appropriate. Had Horswill won the appeal, he would have been able to serve the sentence in the community where he could continue to live at home and go to work but remain subject to various restrictions, including a curfew.

Police, Indigenous blockades going up, work to begin again on pipeline Citizen news service SMITHERS — The RCMP lifted an exclusion zone Friday that cut off public access to a forest service road in northern British Columbia at the site of a confrontation this week between Mounties and opponents of a natural gas pipeline. Police say the public and media can travel on the road in the Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory but the RCMP will be patrolling it to ensure everyone’s safety. Earlier Friday, a convoy of work trucks passed through the police roadblock heading to the Unist’ot’en healing camp to dismantle barriers that had blocked workers from starting construction on the Coastal GasLink pipeline. On Thursday, hereditary chiefs struck a deal with the RCMP to abide with an interim court injunction by not blocking access to the work site. In exchange, the chiefs said members of the First Nation would not be arrested and the Unist’ot’en camp would be allowed to remain intact. Chief Na’Moks said they made the temporary agreement to protect Wet’suwet’en members, some of whom were already traumatized after another checkpoint was dismantled and 14 people were arrested on Monday. The Unist’ot’en is a house group within the five clans that make up the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.

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The agreement applies to an interim court injunction, which is meant to prevent anyone from impeding the company’s work until the defendants, which include members of the Unist’ot’en camp, file a response. Some members of the Wet’suwet’en say the company does not have authority to work on their territory without consent from the nation’s hereditary clan chiefs. TransCanada Corp. says it has signed benefit sharing agreements with the elected councils of all 20 First Nations along the pipeline route. Its Coastal GasLink pipeline would run from northern B.C. though the Wet’suwet’en territory to LNG Canada’s $40 billion export terminal in Kitimat. Coastal GasLink president Rick Gateman said the agreement lays the groundwork for the company to have free access to the area for pre-construction and construction work on the pipeline. The RCMP said in a news release Thursday that police would continue “roving patrols” of the Morice West Forest Service Road. The Mounties said they also set up a temporary RCMP detachment on the road that will be staffed by general duty police officers who “will undergo cultural awareness training on the Wet’suwet’en traditions and will have enhanced training in conflict resolution.”

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