Tag Archives: Duncan

Justice

Breaking down crime statistics on Vancouver Island

Editor’s note: Trends to watch in Campbell River as well as other urban communities on Vancouver Island.

By Mick Sweetman,  CHLY 101.7 FM Nanaimo, through an LJI grant from Canada-info.ca

Violent crime in several Vancouver Island communities is on the rise according to new numbers from Statistics Canada.

Warren Silver, an analyst with Statistics Canada says that’s part of a broader trend across Canada where violent crime peaked in the mid to late 1990s before falling until recent years.

“Violent crime is something that we’re really tracking right now, because we’ve seen increases in quite a lot of places,” he said.

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Arts

Jemma Hicken releases her first major album: ‘Get It Together’

Cortes Island’s own Jemma Hicken just released her first major album, ‘Get it Together.’ Cortes Currents interviewed her shortly before that.  

“I love performing and  I love playing music by myself too, but it does feel special to come back to Cortes and be able to perform on Cortes because it’s really where it started for me,” she said.

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Disaster, Indigenous Nations

First Nations’ emergency capacity stressed as wildfire season rages on

By Alexandra Mehl, Ha-Shilth-Sa, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

This year, before students even closed their books for the summer, forest fires sparked throughout the region. 

The Cameron Bluff fire, which is believed to have been human-caused, grew to 229 hectares, closing Highway 4 for most of June – the only highway in and out for many West Coast communities.

One month later, the 16.6-hectare Klanawa River fire was discovered in what Huu-ay-aht Chief Councillor John Jack referred to as the shared territory between his First Nation and Ditidaht.

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Animals, Education

The Taxidermist behind Wild Cortes

Laurel Bohart has volunteered her time to mount or prepare the study skins of 100 birds, fish and mammals for the Cortes Island Museum. She is a member of the Board and one of the co-curators of Wild Cortes in the Linnaea Farm Education Centre. Bohart is also a professional taxidermist, whose interest can be traced back to her parent’s missionary years in Nigeria during the mid 1960s.

The first words she used to describe taxidermy were, “It’s fun.”

To which she added, “It’s a form of sculpture when you mount a bird or a mammal. It’s better than a photograph, which is two dimensional. These are three dimensional.”   

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Waste

No Sani-dump on Cortes this summer

Cortes Island will not have an RV sani-dump this summer. 

The matter was brought to Cortes Currents attention by former Cortes Museum President Lynne Jordan, who has been living in Duncan for the past four years.  

“The closest RV sani-dump is at the Shell station on the upper highway above Campbell River, two ferries away!  There is no public one on Quadra Island either.  I had planned to visit Cortes this summer for about three weeks to continue doing some more research for the history of Whaletown I am in the process of writing.  With my camper van which has small holding tanks, I will only be staying three or four days at the most,” she wrote.

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