Fire destroys Anglican church in Saskatchewan village

SHELLBROOK, Sask. – Scott Moe is the conservative premier who began life as a left-winger with a shot so hard, it was lights out — literally.

On this recent fall day, Moe stands among the seats at his hometown rink in Shellbrook, north of Saskatoon, and points to the spot on the ice where he was knocked out cold.

He was six years-old at the time, his first year in hockey. He slid into the net, injured himself and hasn’t been the same since.

“I still have a shoulder that doesn’t lift up,” Moe, 51, said in an interview.

His game is now politics and this week the provincial election campaign is expected to begin with polling day on Oct. 28. Moe is seeking his second mandate after spending nearly 13 years in government, six of those as premier.

But long before politics, there was hockey.

Moe grew up loving the sport, labelling himself an average player, who began on the left wing but got moved to defence. He won a provincial title in his teens.

He wasn’t quick, but he could fire the puck, a skill forged through hours of blasting away in his family’s unfinished basement.

He used electrical outlets as targets — and quickly learned what happens when those targets break.

“All the lights go out in the house,” he said. “It was a learning experience for my father. And we very quickly agreed on getting a net.”

It was the game, but also the camaraderie.

“What I love most about it was the team and everybody finds their spot on it, the competition of it and working together to succeed,” he said.

Trevor Miller, who grew up with Moe in Shellbrook, said sports shaped his friend and helped him achieve success.

“I think he does it in a way that’s best for everybody,” Miller said.

At the rink, Miller said, Moe was the team’s glue.

“I wasn’t the guy that was on the power play lots, but Scott would always be there and tell you, ‘You’re part of this team,’” he said.

Moe grew up the oldest of fivein a community-minded farm family. He began his work life selling agriculture equipment and owning gas stations. He and his wife Krista co-own a pharmacy.

They married in the early 1990s and attended the University of Saskatchewan. He received a degree in agriculture, and she in pharmacy. They have two children: Carter and Taryn.

Before he was 30, Moe made some life-altering mistakes.

In 1997, he crashed his car into another after not stopping at a highway intersection, killing Jo-Anne Balog. Balog’s teen son survived the crash, and Moe apologized to him four years ago.

Amund Otterson, the mayor of Shellbrook, recalled Moe getting emotional at a news conference to announce the completion of a twinning project for the highway between Shellbrook and Prince Albert. A child and a man were killed in a car crash there.

“You could really see the compassion he has for people,” he said.

Moe’s interest in politics began while living in Vermilion, Alta., in his early adult life.

Alberta was booming, while Saskatchewan was not, Moe has said. And that’s when he knew policies could change communities.

Moe returned to Saskatchewan in 2003 and became a member of the Saskatchewan Party. He has represented Rosthern-Shellbrook since 2011.

In 2018, after former Premier Brad Wall announced his retirement, Moe entered the leadership race and won with a large backing from caucus. He won his first public mandate in 2020.

Moe’s time as premier has come with challenges, beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic.

He mandated some rules, but public health experts described the measures as lax. He also faced pressure not to impose restrictions at all. In February 2022, when the “Freedom Convoy” blockaded Ottawa, Moe lifted all measures in the province.

There were caucus problems: criminal charges against two members along with retirements and rebuffs that have reduced his governing majority from 48 to 42 in the 61-seat legislature.

Saskatchewan has also struggled with patients waiting longer for health care. School classrooms are overcrowded and inflationary pressures have squeezed wallets.

Moe said he’s addressing these issues by hiring additional health workers, opening health centres and spending more on education.

His administration also stopped paying the federal carbon levy on home heating, a move Moe says has saved people money.

“There’s been times where we’ve had to be fairly firm and stand our ground on behalf of Saskatchewan residents,” he said.

“But I actually view the opportunity that we have over the course of the next four years as one of greater collaboration and coming together, rather than defend what we have and what we’re trying to do.”

And there is still hockey. Moe roots for the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers. His family has a tradition of playing a game at a rink every Christmas.

Moe admits that while Father Time has sapped some of his skills at the ice rink, it has honed them in the political arena.

“I went from being maybe one of the stronger players on the ice to certainly being one of the weaker players,” he said. “But I can still talk my way through.

“Politics,” he laughed, “has ruined my (hockey) career.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2024.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version had an incorrect spelling of Vermilion.

LANG, SASK. – Carla Beck steps out of her SUV with her two dogs and starts walking beside a lake near her hometown, the spot where she learned to feed cows, swing a bat and not keep her mouth shut.

Redlicks Lake near the village of Lang, south of Regina, is the NDP leader’s favourite place to get away and clear her head. She’s gearing up for a provincial election, with polling expected on Oct. 28, in her first bid to become premier.

“I always feel more grounded, more myself, when I get to be out here,” Beck said on a recent fall day.

The sky is grey, starlings flock, crickets chirp and her dogs, Piper and Scout, dash through the grass near acanola field.

“A lot of times people will look and say it’s flat and all the same, but it’s not,” she said. “The skies are always changing, the birds here are always changing. If you look closely, the flowers are different.”

Those close to the 50-year-old say Beck grew up needing to get involved, to make a difference.

“She would stand up for others,” said her mother, Judy Beck, a longtime volunteer and a licensed worship leader who does funeral services.

Her dad, Ray Beck, said she once got punched in the eye as a teen while trying to break up a fight between two other girls.

“She had a beauty shiner,” he said with a laugh.

The oldest of three children, Carla Beck said she knew she wanted to help people as a teen.

She recalled speaking with a girl who had been sexually assaulted. They were both 16 at the time, she said, and the girl was prepared to harm herself. Beck talked her out of it.

“At the end she told me, ‘You’re pretty good at this. You should do this.’ I don’t know if it was as simple as that, but I remember thinking this is something I could do.”

She said her parents always told her to speak out if she saw something wrong.

“What I really couldn’t do — and this won’t surprise people who knew me — I have difficulty keeping my mouth shut.”

Her dad, a former town councillor, runs an outfitting business, taking patrons to hunt ducks and geese. Years ago, the family farmed and raised cattle. The land is now run by his nephews, who give them cuts of beef each year.

When there wasn’t farm work, there was baseball.

Beck’s dad, grandfather and the entire family in 2019 were inducted into the Saskatchewan Baseball Hall of Fame. There’s Beck Field in Lang. Her parents’ home contains trophies, baseballs and other memorabilia — along with NDP flyers.

Beck said her dad would often throw balls for the kids to hit after a day of farming.

“I don’t have a lot of ego in my personal baseball ability,” she said. “I could bat.”

Recently, she came out swinging with a pre-election TV ad showing her hitting balls in a batting cage. Her family liked it, she said, but one of her daughters cringed and her brother thought her swing needed work.

“Saw your ad. Could have given you some pointers,” he teased her in a text message she received while at the Saskatchewan Roughriders football game on Labour Day weekend.

Beck has been in provincial politics for eight years and has spent two of those as leader of the Opposition NDP. She came into that role as the province was coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic and into rising inflation, a top issue in her campaign.

She’s a registered social worker and previously worked at a women’s shelter, a halfway house for youth and the Regina General Hospital.

Beck and her husband, Guy Marsden, married in 1997 at the former United Church in Lang. They live in Saskatchewan’s capital and have three children: Hannah, Nolan and Maya.

In 2009, Beck ran for and won a trustee position with Regina Public Schools. She had advocated to stop the closure of more than a dozen inner-city schools, though some did end up shuttered.

She then decided to get into provincial politics because she thought she could make a bigger difference. She has represented Regina Lakeview since 2016.

Beck said she knows it will be a battle to defeat a Saskatchewan Party government that has been in charge for the last 17 years.

But, like the crickets, canola and starlings of Redlicks Lake, everything has a season.

“People,” she said, “are starting to spontaneously say it’s time for change.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2024.

British Columbia saw a rare unanimous vote in its legislature in October 2019, when members passed a law adopting the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, setting out standards including free, prior and informed consent for actions affecting them.

The law “fundamentally changed the relationship” between First Nations and the province, said Terry Teegee, regional chief of the B.C. Assembly of First Nations.

“Rather than having some sort of consultation, right now we’re actually talking about shared decision-making,” Teegee said in an interview.

John Rustad threw his support behind the legislation as a member of the Official Opposition B.C. Liberal Party, but as the B.C. Conservative leader he has since signalled his intention to “repeal” the law if his party wins the Oct. 19 provincial election.

Rustad said in a statement on the Conservatives’ website last February, that the UN declaration, known as UNDRIP, was “established for conditions in other countries — not Canada.”

Teegee said Rustad was “creating enemies” with First Nations.

“As we come to Sept. 30, he’s repealing, in a way, reconciliation,” Teegee said in an interview ahead of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. “He’s undoing a lot of the good work that many people in this province have worked toward.”

B.C.’s legislation adopts the declaration as the framework for reconciliation and charts a path for the province to negotiate agreements with First Nations aimed at establishing shared decision-making in their territories.

It has led to changes in provincial laws related to land management, including mining and forestry, and it has helped facilitate progress in returning jurisdiction to First Nations over the welfare of their children, Teegee said.

Unravelling the nearly five-year-old legislation would set reconciliation back in B.C., he said, leaving First Nations without a forum to hold constructive discussions about the recognition of land rights and shared decision-making with the province.

“I think it (would) bring us back to 40 years ago, maybe even longer, when the first court cases began by the Nisga’a and Calder,” he said, referring to a landmark case that led to the Supreme Court of Canada recognizing Aboriginal title in 1973.

“If we’re at odds with each other, then many First Nations will continue to do what they did before, (which) was to go to court,” he said. “It leaves a lot of uncertainty.”

The Canadian Press requested an interview with Rustad related to his stance on B.C.’s declaration legislation, but did not receive follow up to arrange a call.

Conservative candidate A’aliya Warbus, a member of the Sto:lo Nation, said asking Rustad about the declaration was “top of mind” when she first met him.

“What the heck? Why would we take this legislation? We fought hard, Indigenous communities, for our rights and recognition of those rights, and upholding social determinants of health in our communities, and this legislation helps us do that.”

But Warbus, who is running in Chilliwack-Cultus Lake, said she was “really satisfied” with her conversation with Rustad.

She said Rustad “explained” that adopting an international framework such as UNDRIP wasn’t the right fit for B.C.’s context, with more than 200 unique First Nations and vast traditional territories that aren’t covered by treaties.

Warbus said B.C.’s declaration legislation is “97 per cent good,” but the application of free, prior and informed consent had not been settled in the province.

She pointed to conflict over the Coastal GasLink pipeline in northwestern B.C.

Opposition among Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs to the 670-kilometre pipeline sparked rallies and rail blockades across Canada in 2020, while the elected council of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and others nearby had agreed to the project.

“That was a key example of how free, prior, informed consent, without definition, doesn’t tell us who gets to make that decision at the end of the day,” Warbus said.

The 670-kilometre pipeline was mechanically completed in November 2023 and an update posted to the project website in June says the focus had turned to the safe operation of the pipeline system as well as cleanup and reclamation work.

“There’s no impetus from me or the party to go backwards on reconciliation at all,” said Warbus, whose father is former B.C. lieutenant-governor Steven Point.

The switch in Rustad’s stance on the declaration came as he was speaking out against proposed changes to B.C.’s Land Act, which have since been scrapped.

The Conservative statement last February starts by saying the changes were an “assault” on private property rights and the right to access shared Crown land.

“Conservatives will defend your rights to outdoor recreation — and your water access, as well as B.C.’s mining, forestry, agriculture sectors and every other land use right,” said the statement posted by Rustad.

A provincial consultation presentation said the proposed changes would have opened the door for shared decision-making under the Land Act, but nothing would require the province to enter into such an agreement with a First Nation.

“The public interest will be a critical part of any provincial government decision to enter into a negotiation of an agreement,” the slide deck said.

The B.C. government announced later in February it was dropping the plan.

At the time, the minister of water, land and resource stewardship, Nathan Cullen, issued a statement saying “some figures (had) gone to extremes to knowingly mislead the public about what the proposed legislation would do.”

Cullen said he spoke with many people during the consultation process who were “surprised to learn that the claims being made … were not true and that there would be no impacts to tenures, renewals, private properties or access to Crown land.”

B.C. Indigenous leaders, including Teegee, have said Rustad was making false statements about the province’s plan and stoking anti-Indigenous sentiment.

In an interview, Teegee said Rustad was engaging in “fear mongering” and using First Nations as a “wedge issue” for political gain ahead of the election.

“I don’t think he can be trusted.”

Rustad led the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation in Christy Clark’s Liberal government, the department was then called Aboriginal Relations,and his statement in February says he signed 435 agreements with First Nations during his tenure as minister.

“Through this economic reconciliation, we saw First Nations communities rise up from impoverished conditions and truly begin to thrive,” the statement says.

Teegee, however, said many of the First Nations leaders who signed agreements during that time would have “plugged their nose and signed them.”

“Some of those First Nations signed them under duress and put that in their agreement themselves. I know my nation did, stating that this wasn’t accommodation,” said Teegee, a member of the Talka Nation in northern B.C. who previously served as tribal chief of the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council.

When asked about criticism of Rustad by other Indigenous leaders, Warbus said it’s “all the more reason to work with him, all the more reason to be directly involved.”

“I feel strongly that Indigenous people need to be inside, involved on the ground, at the legislature level, and that is why I’m doing this,” she added.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 29, 2024.