B.C. extends state of emergency, restrictions on fuel and travel, as 'significant weather' poses more challenges - The Globe and Mail | Canada News Media
A man uses a digger next to a flooded farm in Abbotsford, B.C., Nov. 29, 2021.JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press
British Columbia has extended its state of emergency to support flood recovery efforts as well as orders limiting fuel purchases for non-essential vehicles and restricting travel along hard-hit sections of the province’s compromised highways.
In announcing the extensions on Monday, Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth said the “significant weather” continues to pose challenges for the Trans Mountain Pipeline, which normally brings in 85 per cent of the fuel that is required in B.C. for refining and has been offline since Nov. 14.
“The fuel conservation measures are working and I want to thank British Columbians for their patience – but we need to stay the course for another two weeks until we have the Trans Mountain Pipeline back online,” Mr. Farnworth said. “We need to ensure our supply chains, and emergency services, have the fuel that they need to function.”
The order restricting fuel purchases to 30 litres per visit to a gas station applies to the Lower Mainland, the Sea-to-Sky region, the Sunshine Coast, the Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island. That order, along with the state of emergency that gives the province power to implement it, has been extended until at least Dec. 14.
The province is also extending an order prohibiting non-essential travel on parts of Highways 3, 7 and 99. Those who flout the rules could face fines of up to $2,000.
B.C. is currently in between the second and third of a series of forecasted storms. Efforts to clean up and rebuild following the heavy flooding of two weeks ago, which damaged critical infrastructure and affected every major highway, have taken place alongside overnight efforts involving hundreds of workers and volunteers to sandbag and prepare for more inclement weather. Meanwhile, government has had to find alternate ways to ensure the movement of essential goods such as fuel.
Energy Minister Bruce Ralston said government staff have been working with their federal counterparts at Transport Canada and Natural Resources Canada as well as fuel suppliers, retailers and the Canadian Fuels Association to ensure B.C. has a sufficient fuel supply.
“Fuel has made its way into the Lower Mainland from Alberta through the railways,” Mr. Ralston said Monday. “We also know that some barges have arrived to offload fuel from the U.S. This has provided us with a supply of fuel to compensate for the product that would usually come from the Trans Mountain Pipeline while the company works toward restarting the line.”
CP Rail has said 30 locations were damaged following the rainstorm, but resumed some operations last week.
However, some producers are still struggling with the transportation challenges of damaged infrastructure. The forestry company West Fraser has announced it is temporarily shutting down two pulp mills, with 220 workers laid off, according to the Williams Lake Tribune. The company said it is unable to ship product and has run out of accessible storage.
In Abbotsford, Mayor Henry Braun said Monday that water from the Nooksack River that breached a dike in Sumas, Wash., and was expected to flood into his city Sunday ended up taking a day longer than predicted by U.S. officials. As well, the Fraser River dropped low enough that Abbotsford could reopen the floodgates at its Barrowtown Pump Station after a brief closing, which allowed water from the Sumas River to drain.
“Those two things in combination make me very comfortable, and I feel much better today than I did yesterday at this point on the second [weather] event,” the mayor told a news conference. “The third one is still an unknown. Everything is holding, so I think we’re in good shape.”
The water had not reached the critically affected Sumas Prairie lake bottom as of Monday afternoon, but did reach about two feet in Abbotsford’s Huntingdon Village, along the U.S. border, where an evacuation order remains in place.
Armel Castellan, a warning preparedness meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, said Monday that southern B.C. was on a“24-hour break” from rain and that the next system is again an atmospheric river, coming in from near the Philippines, travelling 8,000 to 9,000 kilometres over the past few days.
“It will deliver a relatively strong punch, similar to what we saw this weekend,” he said. “We’re talking about 50 to 100 milimetres on the south coast for the Lower Mainland, Sunshine Coast, Howe Sound and the Fraser Valley.”
Mr. Castellan added that the region is dealing not only with rain, but also snow melt and a successive storm event.
“So even if the third storm is not as bad as it could have been in the modelling leading up to today, it will be problematic because they are coming so close, back to back, with the runoff and the saturated soil.”
B.C.’s River Forecast Centre upgraded flood alerts for all of Vancouver Island and a large stretch of the south coast, from Vancouver to Bella Coola, on Monday morning.
In the Cowichan District, which has been in a local state of emergency since mid-November, 147 properties have been assessed for damage from floods in the past two weeks. A flood centre run by the regional district with the Cowichan Tribes, Halalt First Nation, and Penelakut Tribe served 200 people in the past four days. With additional heavy rains in the forecast, a team of 30 Canadian Forces members was deployed on the weekend to the most affected communities of the region to support sandbagging and preparedness.
With up to 100 millimetres of rain forecast for Tuesday and Wednesday in Howe Sound, the Squamish Nation had emergency crews sandbagging vulnerable areas to protect against rising levels of the Cheakamus River. The nation was securing accommodation and preparing Totem Hall in Squamish as a reception centre in case residents need to evacuate.
Meanwhile, close to 10 per cent of blueberry fields in B.C. were affected by the floods, and some farmers aren’t sure whether they will be able to invest the time and money to start over.
The BC Blueberry Council estimates that at least 2,500 acres of blueberries have been affected, including about 1,000 acres that remain underwater in the Sumas Prairie. Statistics Canada reports that the total acreage of blueberry production in the province is about 27,000 acres.
The blueberry council added that some portions of the Matsqui Flats area, and other areas near the Fraser River, were also flooded and are likely to experience varying degrees of damage or loss.
Blueberry bushes die when submerged for long periods. Harry Sidhu, a blueberry farmer in the Sumas Prairie, said it’s likely that severely affected growers will need to pull their bushes and replant, at a high cost.
“Blueberries are a perennial plant and it takes years for a sizable crop yield, so this may be a significant loss of income for many years,” Mr. Sidhu said in a statement.
Mr. Braun said last week that his heart ached for the farmers who told him through tears that they can’t afford to start over.
“Some of those farmers, they’ve told me that they don’t know if they’re going to [replant], they don’t know if they financially can do that,” he said.
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Job seekers owe it to themselves to understand and accept; fundamentally, hiring is a process of elimination. Regardless of how many applications an employer receives, the ratio revolves around several applicants versus one job opening, necessitating elimination.
Essentially, job gatekeepers—recruiters, HR and hiring managers—are paid to find reasons and faults to reject candidates (read: not move forward) to find the candidate most suitable for the job and the company.
Nowadays, employers are inundated with applications, which forces them to double down on reasons to eliminate. It’s no surprise that many job seekers believe that “isms” contribute to their failure to get interviews, let alone get hired. Employers have a large pool of highly qualified candidates to select from. Job seekers attempt to absolve themselves of the consequences of actions and inactions by blaming employers, the government or the economy rather than trying to increase their chances of getting hired by not giving employers reasons to eliminate them because of:
Typos, grammatical errors, poor writing skills.
“Communication, the human connection, is the key to personal and career success.” ― Paul J. Meyer.
The most vital skill you can offer an employer is above-average communication skills. Your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, and social media posts should be well-written and error-free.
Failure to communicate the results you achieved for your previous employers.
If you can’t quantify (e.g. $2.5 million in sales, $300,000 in savings, lowered average delivery time by 6 hours, answered 45-75 calls daily with an average handle time of 3 and a half minutes), then it’s your opinion. Employers care more about your results than your opinion.
An incomplete LinkedIn profile.
Before scheduling an interview, the employer will review your LinkedIn profile to determine if you’re interview-worthy. I eliminate any candidate who doesn’t have a complete LinkedIn profile, including a profile picture, banner, start and end dates, or just a surname initial; anything that suggests the candidate is hiding something.
Having a digital footprint that’s a turnoff.
If an employer is considering your candidacy, you’ll be Google. If you’re not getting interviews before you assert the unfounded, overused excuse, “The hiring system is broken!” look at your digital footprint. Employers are reading your comments, viewing your pictures, etc. Ask yourself, is your digital behaviour acceptable to employers, or can it be a distraction from their brand image and reputation? On the other hand, not having a robust digital footprint is also a red flag, particularly among Gen Y and Gen Z hiring managers. Not participating on LinkedIn, social media platforms, or having a blog or website can hurt your job search.
Not appearing confident when interviewing.
Confidence = fewer annoying questions and a can-do attitude.
It’s important for employers to feel that their new hire is confident in their abilities. Managing an employee who lacks initiative, is unwilling to try new things, or needs constant reassurance is frustrating.
Job searching is a competition; you’re always up against someone younger, hungrier and more skilled than you.
Besides being a process of elimination, hiring is also about mitigating risk. Therefore, being seen as “a risk” is the most common reason candidates are eliminated, with the list of “too risky” being lengthy, from age (will be hard to manage, won’t be around long) to lengthy employment gaps (raises concerns about your abilities and ambition) to inappropriate social media postings (lack of judgement).
Envision you’re a hiring manager hiring for an inside sales manager role. In the absence of “all things being equal,” who’s the least risky candidate, the one who:
offers empirical evidence of their sales results for previous employers, or the candidate who “talks a good talk”?
is energetic, or the candidate who’s subdued?
asks pointed questions indicating they’re concerned about what they can offer the employer or the candidate who seems only concerned about what the employer can offer them.
posts on social media platforms, political opinions, or the candidate who doesn’t share their political views?
on LinkedIn and other platforms in criticizes how employers hire or the candidate who offers constructive suggestions?
has lengthy employment gaps, short job tenure, or a steadily employed candidate?
lives 10 minutes from the office or 45 minutes away?
has a resume/LinkedIn profile that shows a relevant linear career or the candidate with a non-linear career?
dressed professionally for the interview, or the candidate who dressed “casually”?
An experienced hiring manager (read: has made hiring mistakes) will lean towards candidates they feel pose the least risk. Hence, presenting yourself as a low-risk candidate is crucial to job search success. Worth noting, the employer determines their level of risk tolerance, not the job seeker, who doesn’t own the business—no skin in the game—and has no insight into the challenges they’ve experienced due to bad hires and are trying to avoid similar mistakes.
“Taking a chance” on a candidate isn’t in an employer’s best interest. What’s in an employer’s best interest is to hire candidates who can hit the ground running, fit in culturally, and are easy to manage. You can reduce the odds (no guarantee) of being eliminated by demonstrating you’re such a candidate.
Nick Kossovan, a well-seasoned veteran of the corporate landscape, offers “unsweetened” job search advice. You can send Nick your questions to artoffindingwork@gmail.com.
Human Resources Officers must be very busy these days what with the general turnover of employees in our retail and business sectors. It is hard enough to find skilled people let alone potential employees willing to be trained. Then after the training, a few weeks go by then they come to you and ask for a raise. You refuse as there simply is no excess money in the budget and away they fly to wherever they come from, trained but not willing to put in the time to achieve that wanted raise.
I have had potentials come in and we give them a test to see if they do indeed know how to weld, polish or work with wood. 2-10 we hire, and one of those is gone in a week or two. Ask that they want overtime, and their laughter leaving the building is loud and unsettling. Housing starts are doing well but way behind because those trades needed to finish a project simply don’t come to the site, with delay after delay. Some people’s attitudes are just too funny. A recent graduate from a Ivy League university came in for an interview. The position was mid-management potential, but when we told them a three month period was needed and then they would make the big bucks they disappeared as fast as they arrived.
Government agencies are really no help, sending us people unsuited or unwilling to carry out the jobs we offer. Handing money over to staffing firms whose referrals are weak and ineffectual. Perhaps with the Fall and Winter upon us, these folks will have to find work and stop playing on the golf course or cottaging away. Tried to hire new arrivals in Canada but it is truly difficult to find someone who has a real identity card and is approved to live and work here. Who do we hire? Several years ago my father’s firm was rocking and rolling with all sorts of work. It was a summer day when the immigration officers arrived and 30+ employees hit the bricks almost immediately. The investigation that followed had threats of fines thrown at us by the officials. Good thing we kept excellent records, photos and digital copies. We had to prove the illegal documents given to us were as good as the real McCoy.
Restauranteurs, builders, manufacturers, finishers, trades-based firms, and warehousing are all suspect in hiring illegals, yet that becomes secondary as Toronto increases its minimum wage again bringing our payroll up another $120,000. Survival in Canada’s financial and business sectors is questionable for many. Good luck Chuck!. at least your carbon tax refund check should be arriving soon.
NORMAN WELLS, N.W.T. – Imperial Oil says it will temporarily reduce its fuel prices in a Northwest Territories community that has seen costs skyrocket due to low water on the Mackenzie River forcing the cancellation of the summer barge resupply season.
Imperial says in a Facebook post it will cut the air transportation portion that’s included in its wholesale price in Norman Wells for diesel fuel, or heating oil, from $3.38 per litre to $1.69 per litre, starting Tuesday.
The air transportation increase, it further states, will be implemented over a longer period.
It says Imperial is closely monitoring how much fuel needs to be airlifted to the Norman Wells area to prevent runouts until the winter road season begins and supplies can be replenished.
Gasoline and heating fuel prices approached $5 a litre at the start of this month.
Norman Wells’ town council declared a local emergency on humanitarian grounds last week as some of its 700 residents said they were facing monthly fuel bills coming to more than $5,000.
“The wholesale price increase that Imperial has applied is strictly to cover the air transportation costs. There is no Imperial profit margin included on the wholesale price. Imperial does not set prices at the retail level,” Imperial’s statement on Monday said.
The statement further said Imperial is working closely with the Northwest Territories government on ways to help residents in the near term.
“Imperial Oil’s decision to lower the price of home heating fuel offers immediate relief to residents facing financial pressures. This step reflects a swift response by Imperial Oil to discussions with the GNWT and will help ease short-term financial burdens on residents,” Caroline Wawzonek, Deputy Premier and Minister of Finance and Infrastructure, said in a news release Monday.
Wawzonek also noted the Territories government has supported the community with implementation of a fund supporting businesses and communities impacted by barge cancellations. She said there have also been increases to the Senior Home Heating Subsidy in Norman Wells, and continued support for heating costs for eligible Income Assistance recipients.
Additionally, she said the government has donated $150,000 to the Norman Wells food bank.
In its declaration of a state of emergency, the town said the mayor and council recognized the recent hike in fuel prices has strained household budgets, raised transportation costs, and affected local businesses.
It added that for the next three months, water and sewer service fees will be waived for all residents and businesses.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 21, 2024.
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