The smoke police They’re coming soon to a workplace near you to enforce the new rules\NEWS A13 Trip to Ottawa Wrestlemania Sukhdeep Atwal raves about her all-expense paid trip to the nation’ S capital\ COMMUNITY C1 Terrace kicks off their wrestling season with a second place finish in Hazelton\SPORTS B6 WEDNESDAY December 15, 1999 Talks to sell SCI collapse NEGOTIATIONS to sell Skeena Cellulose to Tex- as-based Enron Corp. end- ed in failure last week. The province broke off the nearly six months of talks Dec. 7 and ended an exclusivity agreement un- der which it had agreed not to talk to other paten- tial buyers. “There were a number of outstanding issues that we didn’t come to tesolu- tion with and as a result the talks broke down,” employment and . invest- meni ministry spokesman Don Zadravec explained. He would not say whether money was the main factor in the failure to reach a deal, adding the province is maintaining its agreement to keep the dis- cussions confidential. But John Sandrelli, the lawyer representing SCI’s unionized pulp workers, said government officials indicated Enron’s offer just wasn’t reasonable, “As far as we under- stand it Enron was asking for too much from the gov- ernment,” Sandrelli said. Zadravec said that while there are no other suitors right now, the promise to deal only with Enron has only just ended. “We are now willing to talk to other parties,” he said, adding it will be “business as usual” in the meantime, Other companics had been “kicking the tires” before serious talks with Enron began, he noted. SCT lost money in the first nine months of 1999 combined, despite individ- ual months of profit. Interest from buyers started back in June im- mediately after the prov- ince delivered on its prom- ise to guarantee $110 mil- lion worth of capital im- provements, primarily aimed at modernizing the Prince Rupert pulp mill. The mill has returned to full production this month - a move expected to mean more efficient and profitable pulp production in the months ahead. © The failure of the Enron talks also leaves Quebec- based Tembec Inc. without a role in SCI’s future. Tembec was expecied to operate SCI for Enron had the deal been con- cluded, union and provin- cial government officials said. Enron's primary interest in SCI was thought to be access to a source of pulp to back up its plans to off- er a pulp price hedging service to pulp customers. Tembec officials won’t say whether they antic- ipate involvement in any lew proposals to buy SCI. “We don’t know yet what we will do,” Tembec spokeswoman Adele Be- langer said of the collapse of talks. Tembec is based in Te- miscaming, Quebec, where the company was born in 1973 as part of a combined effort of em- ployees, the community and government to save the town’s pulp mill. the flag to protest Canada's treatment BILL, CHRISTIANSEN, a Kitsumkalum village social worker, | ) is olanning to burn of native people. Man vows to burn flag over native IF BURNING the Canadian flag will get Ottawa to take notice of the social prob- lems plaguing aboriginal peaple across Canada, then that’s what a local man is willing to do. Bill Christiansen says he'll burn the flag this spring in front of city hall to pro- test what he calls maltreatment of native people. “If I burn the flag it’s simply out of frustration,” Christiansen said. “I simply want someone to listen, There are people dying in native communities and no-one is doing anything about it:” Christensen, who is taking a social work program at Northwest Community College, said he’s written to Reform MP Mike Scott and other officials about drug and alcohol addictions, the suicide rate and sexual abuse occurring on reserves, “What J want isthe government to ac- knowledge that there are social issues and to fix them,” he said. He said reserves need resources to cor- rect social ills facing native people. “We're approaching the 21st. century and a lot of social issues on the reserve are 20 to 30 years behind.” “[t’s the follow-up we need,” he said, “We need full-time help, not just a work- shop once in a while.” “How many more children have to suffer because of a lack of family skills?” He wonders how the government can treatment spend millions of dollars assisting other countries when (hey cannot even look af- ter their own people. Christiansen says the only way native life will greatly improve is if the Indian Act and the reserve system are abolished. The reserve system, he says, segre- gales native people. “T hate the word reserve,” he said. “It’s derogatory. It labels us as being a special society. Why put a political fence around a community?” He'd like to see Kitsumkalum, where he lives, treated like any other area. Christiansen also wants the govern- ment to abolish the Indian Act, which dictates how the government administers Native reserves and treaties, and limits the control of bands and band councils. The Indian Act, he said, makes natives dependent on the federal government. in a letter Christiansen sent to Mike Scott, he states:. ~ “Quit treating aboriginal people as though they were not people. They are not part of this authoritarian country in any shape or form. “As a symbol of a multicultural socic- ty, I see Canada as a dictatorship... solely because of their imperialistic view of aboriginal people as stated in the Indian Act. ; “When the Indian Act is burnt, [ will quit burning this Canadian flag!” very h igh $1.00 PLUS 7¢ GST ($1.20 plus 8¢ GST. outside of tha Terrace area) VOL. 12 NO. 36 leve Public anxiety must be answered, MLA says SKEENA NDP MLA Hel- mut Giesbrecht says he’s as puzzled as anybody over the problems of bed and nursing shortages at Mills Memorial Hospital. “Mills got the largest -— $886,000 — budget in- crease around and not even a year has gone by and there’s more anxiety,” he said last week. So what Giesbrecht wants is for people to give him details of their health care experiences so they can be checked out. “The anxiety level is so high but there are no spe- cifics. We need specifics,” he said. Exact details are need- ed so as to determine spe- cifically what occurred in each circumstance, Gies- brecht continued, “In some cases there is a fesponse and an expla- nation that makes sense. We need to know dates and times,” Giesbrecht. ad- ded. “Sometimes it may be a judgment call by a med- ical practitioner and things lead from that. That begs the question, if an expert makes a decision, how can that be a matter of not enough beds or nal enough nurses,” he said. Giesbrecht’s call for personal experiences fol- lows on what appears to be growing concern over the slate of health care al Mills Memorial Hospital. It regularly issues notic- es saying it can’t take any more patients, savé emer- Bency cases, because of a shortage of nurses. The nursing shortage leads to admission limits as fhe number of beds open depends upon having Helmut Giesbrecht nurses available to look after patients. The shortages have caused local doctors to say they'll now follow admis- sion restriction guidelines. They say they*re doing this in support of a nursing complement they feel is understaffed and under reat stress. “Mills got the largest ~ $886,000 ~ budget increase around and not even a year has gone by and there’s more anx- iety.” In addition to Gies- brecht’s call for details, a local citizens group wor- tied about health care is also asking people for their experiences. That group, Concerned Citizens for Healthcare, has met once with Gies- brecht, staged a rally which drew nearly 150 people and marched in front of Mills Dec, 1 to call for more money for the hospital. The Skeena MLA. is leery of rallies and demon- strations. “To me, holding rallies and stuff is not a good way of addressing separate needs,” he said. “We've got to separate the politics from this.” Giesbrecht did say he acknowledges one problem facing Mills — providing some regional specialty services without an ac- companying budget to do 0. This in turn drives up costs at Mills and places its budget in trouble. But dealing with that can’t take the form of cen- tralizing services to the point other hospitals can’t offer specialty. medical care, he said. The concept of regional services isn’t fully em- braced by health care offi- cials elséwhere in the northwest. One such proposal te- volves around Terrace and Kitimat sharing orthopedic surgery with mare high end operations done here and more routine ones handled in Kitimat. Local specialists favour thal approach and have of- fered to travel to Kitimat to provide other specialty services to replace what might be lost if urthoped- ics is shared. Giesbrecht said Kitimat ow health care officials aren’t | convinced that local spe-* cialists will do what they say. “I gather there’s not much in an ironclad guar- antee of such services,” he said. For more on health care issues, please see page A15 New chipping deal to send sawmill crews back to work CLOSE TO 35 West Fraser employees are being called back to work alter the company reached a deal Thursday to re- sume custom chipping for Skeena Cellu- lose. ' Those workers had been laid off since mid-October while the two companies tried to renegotiate the chipping deal. This time instead of a three-month trial arrangement they've emerged with a five- year contract, West Fraser general man- ager Lou Poulin said Friday. “It means probably another 30 to 35 people will be back on the payroll start- ing January 4th,” Poulin said, West Fraser’s Skeena Sawmills wilk run two chipping shifts in addition to its one regular sawmill! shift and one planer mill shift, he said. SCI is expected to resume deliveries of logs to West Fraser soon. The deal lets West Fraser extract us- able sawlogs to process into lumber from those deliveries, replacing that wood with the equivalent volume of its own pulp logs. The custom chipping arrangement be- gan in the spring after Skeena Cellulose pulled out of a deal that had seen Don Hull and Sons Contracting operate a chipper in the Poirier yard. The chipping helps buffer the job loss- es that would have happened since West Fraser ended its second sawmill shift in September, 1998, and after a federal work-sharing program expired in June. Heavy rains flush city sewage into ditches ANOTHER 5PILL of city sew- age happened Dec. 4 during the same extremely heavy rains that washed out part of Kalum hill. Far too much water entered sanitary sewer lines from a com- bination of homeowners pumping out flooding basements and wa: ter in the streets enlering through manhole covers, said city direc- tor of engineering Stew Chris- tensen. He estimated double the nor- mal peak flow was moving in Graham Ave. sewer lines. That resulied in overflows of untreated sewage through re- lease valves into the Braun’s Is- land slough and into a ditch south of Eby St. that cuns from Graham Ave. to the river for - about five hours that day. “We estimate about. 20 cubic ‘thelres flowed into the Braun’s Island slough,” Christensen said, “Thal’s quite dilluted ‘ sewage because the flows were so high at that point.” The release valves exist so sewage doesn't back up into houses in such a situation. Christensen said it’s the high- est flow he’s seen in city sewer lines in several years, adding the situation was highly unusual. Braun's Island residents, who have been vigilant in monitoring city sewer operations since last -July’s flood caused a spill of treated sewage around the is- and, said it-was the latest ex- ample of faulty city facilities threatening their neighbourhood. “Graham Street sewer Line needs to be upgraded,” said Dia- na Penner. “It’s at capacity at normal times never mind when you add extra water to it.” The city may attach 1 bypass line that would ensure any over- flow at the west end of Graham would be carried to the sewage lreatment plant, rather than into the slough, Christensen said. “That's what we're looking al doing sometime in the year 2000," he said. Had that work been done soonet, Penner noted, the slough spill would not have happened. Christensen said tests of slough water where the spill happened showed low fecal cal- liform levels. Test readings of 7 and 130 were still within limits allowed for recreational contact, ~ “Tt’s lower than what [ would have anticipated for the slough If we hadn't put anything in,” Christensen said.