BREAKING: Police incident at North Vancouver MLA's office
The office of North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma was behind police tape Friday morning as Mounties investigated an incident.
The constituency office of North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma was behind police tape Friday morning as Mounties investigated an incident.
Few details have been confirmed, though North Vancouver RCMP said they would share more information later in the day.
Images from the scene show multiple police vehicles gathered outside Ma's office on Esplanade West in the city's Lower Lonsdale neighbourhood.
In a statement issued through the B.C. NDP caucus, Ma – who also serves as the government's minister of infrastructure – said all meetings and appointments at her office Friday had been cancelled 'due to a security incident that occurred in the early hours' of the morning.
'Thankfully, nobody was injured, but incidents like this can be quite frightening,' the statement reads, though it does not elaborate on the nature of what happened.
Ma's statement goes on to thank community members who have expressed their concern.
'I am grateful to serve such a caring and compassionate community,' she said. 'I'd also like to thank the officers who responded for their diligence and professionalism. Due to the active police investigation, I will not be able to provide more details at this time.'
This is a developing story. Check back for updates
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Confessions of a gun smuggler: How I brought weapons into Canada
Social Sharing Everyone knows guns used by Canadian criminals are often smuggled from the U.S. Not everyone knows how — not like Naomi Haynes does. That's because she did the smuggling. A native Montrealer who's been living in the U.S. for decades, she helped traffic dozens of weapons into Canada, some linked directly to drug gangs. "I wasn't thinking about the havoc I was causing in my birth land," she told CBC News last week. "I've got my kids, I've got bills. The only thing I [was] thinking about is monetary gains. I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected." CBC News established contact with Haynes while she was in prison — at first communicating by email, then with a glitchy prison video app and then in a lengthy interview following her release last year. Her story helps shed light on the thousands of guns a year in Canada that police trace to the U.S. She described, in detail, tricks of the smuggling trade. And how she managed to move drugs, cash and, eventually, guns, for many years, depending on the product — either into the U.S., between U.S. states or into Canada. Rule No. 1: Only one person per car. If the vehicle gets stopped at the border, you don't want two partners tripping over each other's story during secondary questioning. "There's only one story this way," said Haynes, 45. "If you have two drivers, there's conflicting stories and that's when you have problems. … 'Oh, you're coming from Virginia, but your friend says [she's] coming from Baltimore.'" "So just one driver, so they can stick with their one lie." I wasn't thinking about the people who are going to be affected. - Naomi Haynes Rule No. 2: Find a good hiding spot. She would stash items in hidden compartments under seats; in door panels; in the trunk. She'd also move drugs in a gas tank — in triple-sealed, vacuumed bags. Rule No. 3: Get drivers who won't arouse suspicion. Haynes didn't transport guns herself; she got pulled over too often. She'd ride in a separate vehicle. "I started paying white girls and guys to move stuff for me," she said. Especially white women. They never got pulled over, she said. Until one did. Haynes was arrested in 2019, charged with smuggling, and with conspiracy to make false statements; she pleaded guilty, was sentenced, and served just under five years in prison. Hers is an unusual story. She's a vegan, millennial, Jamaican Canadian political science grad in South Florida who supports Donald Trump, became a grandma and wound up in an international conspiracy. Then again, her life story was atypical from the start. Escaping Montreal "At the end of the day, you become what you know," Haynes said. She grew up around drug dealers. Her late father dealt crack, then smoked it. In a book she's writing about her life story, Haynes describes a period when he became meaner, zoned out and indifferent, his eyes bloodshot. Her book describes one sister jailed for selling ecstasy. Another sibling, her brother, led a local street gang, according to the Montreal Gazette. She grew up in the area just south of the old Montreal Forum; her grandmother worked in the hallowed hockey shrine. From childhood, Haynes earned money in unconventional ways. Her half-complete memoir, entitled The Runner: Tripped by the Feds, begins with the words: "For as long as I can remember I have had a hustle." She ran store errands for adults and got to keep the change; collected beer bottles from their parties and returned them for cash; and, later, resold contraband cigarettes. "I made my first $1,000 in the seventh grade," she writes. She was desperate to escape the scene, to flee the bad influences. Haynes harboured a childhood dream of living in the States, and in 1997, she made it happen. She enrolled in college. She got a bachelor's degree from Florida Atlantic University, according to court documents, and also studied criminal science. She started smuggling to pay for school. And she made poor choices, she says, about whom she surrounded herself with. The man who became her husband made a $5,000 down payment on a Jeep Cherokee for her; she used that vehicle and received thousands of dollars more to move hashish, hash oil and marijuana into Canada. Over the years, she shipped contraband countless times: ecstasy, cocaine, marijuana, hash and cash, occasionally driving on her own, but usually hiring someone. She'd move products from buyer to seller, often across international lines, but also domestically, say, from Florida to Chicago. It was only many years later that she started selling guns. Around 2016, Haynes was desperately low on cash — she was divorced, with a baby, not working and with an older boy playing intercity baseball. "Everybody that I always did business with always said, 'No guns, no guns, no guns,' because there's a trail," she told CBC News. But it was great cash, about $4,000 Cdn per gun. On a nine-millimetre handgun that costs a couple of hundred bucks in South Florida, it's an astronomical profit. She'd ship about 20 at a time, and there were multiple shipments. She admits to two of them, which she figures generated about $160,000. Subtracting the cost of the purchase, the driver and her partner's share, she estimates she kept about $30,000, which helped her live comfortably for a few months. And then it cost her everything. WATCH | Major Toronto gang busts connected to Hayes's network: Law enforcement closes in Police started closing in on Haynes from different angles — arresting associates, seizing phones, recording conversations and catching her in lies. It started after she purchased 20 weapons from different Florida gun stores in February 2018. 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'I knew I was cooked' One loaded Taurus 9mm was found hidden in the panel of a car, alongside approximately $300,000 worth of cocaine. Days later, a Ruger .380 was found in another drug bust. The suspect tossed it aside while attempting to flee police. In September of that year, a friend she'd hired was stopped while crossing into Canada from New York state, carrying 20 hidden guns. Haynes was recorded following right behind her — crossing the border 62 minutes later. A number of the seized guns traced back to her circle. By this point, police had gained an informant. They were secretly recording conversations within her circle, even one involving Haynes's daughter. On Feb. 27, 2019, her daughter's boyfriend, Mackenzie Delmas, was caught. The informant delivered guns to him and Delmas was arrested immediately. Agents searched his home — and Haynes's. That's when Haynes knew she was done for. She was visiting her parents' home in the Montreal area. 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In subsequent recorded interviews on March 13 and April 3, she confessed everything: the fake identities, the illegal gun purchases, the shipments to Canada, the sales to known Canadian gangsters, her own trips north to collect cash and, crucially, her lies to police. She was arrested, and spent four years, nine months in prison, serving time in a low-security prison in Alabama. It was predictably miserable. She recalled guards treating inmates cruelly and arbitrarily — being decent to some of the meanest inmates, and mean to decent ones, people who got mixed up, in some cases accidentally, in bad situations. The worst was during COVID-19. After testing positive, she was sent to solitary confinement. "I was in the shoe for 13 days," she said. "I felt like a dog in a kennel. … The room was filthy. It was disgusting. The sinks — the water was brown. The toilet, it was disgusting." Her main diet in prison consisted of peanut butter. 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As separatist sentiments intensified, the then-premier had tasked his panel to study the viability of an Alberta-only pension and police force, an overhaul of federal transfers and more. That's just what Smith has done, though with some pivotal distinctions. Kenney tasked long-retired former politician Preston Manning to lead his panel. Smith assigned herself as chair. While this stands to boost the interest in upcoming town halls, some of the Alberta Next event attendees might want to bend the premier's ear on other matters, as this month's fiery meeting on coal mining may have foretold. The current premier is also specifically soliciting referendum questions to put on a ballot next year. Those would interact in unknown ways with a citizen-initiated plebiscite on separation, one which proposes a vastly more dramatic shakeup in Alberta-Canada relations. 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The section on fiscal transfers, for example, suggests that the imbalance between the federal taxes Albertans pay and the service grants to the province be solved by getting Ottawa to drastically cut its tax rates and have the provinces raise money on their own. "That sounds great on the surface for Alberta, but this idea has been floating around for many years, and the challenge is that a lot of other provinces end up far worse off by having those tax point transfers," Wesley said. On immigration reform, Smith's panel survey suggests that Alberta refuse to fund public services for certain classes of immigrants the provincial government doesn't wish to accept. Without specifying what type of services would be withheld, and to which immigrants, it could serve to harm newcomers in Alberta and inflame sentiments around them while blaming them for housing affordability and unemployment woes, said immigration lawyer Maureen Silcoff. 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CBC
an hour ago
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To 'build, baby, build,' this country is going to need a whole lot more shop teachers
To meet the federal government's promise to "build, baby, build," the country is going to need a whole lot more skilled trades workers. But a shortage of shop class teachers in Canadian high schools might make them hard to find. "We have a massive shortage of trained teachers," said Andy Strothotte, who has been a shop teacher for 31 years and is president of the British Columbia Technology Education Teachers Association. His counterparts in other parts of the country report the same. About 700,000 skilled trades workers are set to retire between 2019 and 2028, according to federal government numbers, and shop classes are a key tool for getting students interested in pursuing those careers. The number of new tradespeople needed may even be higher than that, given the Liberal government's promise to build 500,000 homes per year, and to undertake various — yet unspecified — "nation-building" infrastructure projects. There's a shortage of all teachers in British Columbia, but Strothotte told Cost of Living that it's particularly challenging to recruit people to teach woodworking, metal work or other tech classes. Those jobs are so specialized — plus, a teacher's starting salary is less than people typically make in the trades. "We're working on trying to get salary equality recognized, so that people who have a trades background who have this Red Seal, have years of experience, get a bump up on the pay scale," said Strothotte, who teaches at Westview Secondary School in Maple Ridge, B.C. High cost to retrain as a teacher Even worse, prospective shop teachers give up those good salaries to take on several years of school expenses. In B.C., the main pathway to becoming a tech-ed teacher is to spend two years at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) doing a technology education teaching diploma, followed by one year at the University of British Columbia in general teaching education. "That's a huge hit for a family to take, to be three years out of the industry, out of work," said Strothotte. The training used to take just two years if you already had trades experience. There are some lobbying efforts underway to try to reinstate that accelerated program, he says. Ontario also has a tech education teacher shortage, in part because what used to be a one-year teacher's college program became two years in 2015, says Christine German, executive director of the Ontario Council for Technology Education. "This two-year teacher's college is really creating a barrier for all teachers, but also us," said German. Though some of the tech education teacher training programs are 16 months, with online components to add flexibility, candidates are still paying double the tuition they used to, and often incurring travel costs as well, she says. Documents obtained by the Canadian Press in April revealed that Ontario is considering shortening the teacher training to address the problem of plummeting admissions to teacher's colleges. Cost of Living reached out to every provincial and territorial government, asking for the number of vacant tech education positions and plans to address the problem. Among the eight that responded by publication time, most said they do not tabulate the number of vacancies, and that individual boards would have that data. But Nunavut, B.C., Alberta, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland and Labrador all pointed to various initiatives to recruit and retain teachers, including tech educators. Strothotte says issues like burn-out, injury or working conditions might bring some tradespeople into tech ed. "Or they're just tired of lying under a diesel cat at minus 60 degrees in the tundra, and they'd rather be working in a heated shop with students and sharing their passion with them," he said. Maryke Simmonds worked in theatre for two decades, building props and sets, but went back to school at BCIT to become a shop teacher. She graduated last August, along with 21 others. "At school, they told us that Surrey [School District] could take all of us — right away after graduation — and still need more shop teachers." That doesn't surprise Strothotte. B.C. currently has around 55 open jobs for shop teachers and if those don't get filled, classes will get cancelled, he said. Sometimes that means the shops themselves will get shuttered — in some cases, never to reopen again, he says. WATCH | This college event introduced female high school students to the trades: 'Jill of All Trades' introduces female high school students to the skilled trades 1 month ago Duration 2:19 Facilities and materials often in short supply That's another limitation for provinces looking to bolster their ranks of tradespeople — not every high school has a shop, and some that once did have been converted to other kinds of classrooms when interest in and funding for tech education classes waned. In Ontario, the provincial government made it mandatory for every student to take at least one tech education credit as of the 2024-25 school year. "This is our government saying it's really important for our students to explore technological education — skilled trades and technology — as early as they possibly can because it's a fantastic thing for students, [and] very, very needed in our country," said German. Stotthotte says the funding for materials hasn't "hasn't really changed" in the last 15 years. He canvasses local businesses for donations of scraps, or jumps in his pickup when he sees listings on Facebook for free plywood or other supplies. In Calgary, there's a new partnership called Adopt-a-Shop between high schools and the Calgary Construction Association, in which home builders, plumbing companies and others donate money, materials and expertise. That kind of initiative supports students like Tayah Kilb, who just finished Grade 11 at Central Memorial High School in Calgary, to explore the possibility of a career in the trades. Kilb says she had never considered it before she took a woodworking class this year, first making a table for her family room, then some custom furniture for her bedroom. "I have a completely pink room and I couldn't find any bedside table that matched it … so I just made one in construction and painted it pink." The experience has her set her sights on working in construction as a framer.
