Monday - Feb. 26, 2024 - Eyeing an upcoming election

☀️ High 10C

Good morning!

I know I’ve said before that I don’t like audiobooks, but I’m learning. My most recent revelation has been Pride and Prejudice on Spotify. Spotify’s new audiobook section mostly needs listeners to pay for each book separately. But classics in the public domain usually have free versions if you’re already subscribing to the app (libraries have lots of copies, too! Sometimes there are waitlists on popular titles).

I haven’t ever read Pride and Prejudice. I could never quite get into it. I didn’t know which parts were supposed to be funny. But the tone of the audiobook’s narrator (fittingly, an old British lady) gives my brain the extra shove it needs to track who’s being sarcastic, who’s being funny, who’s being flirty, and who’s just being plain mean. The book is mostly characters talking. It’s only fitting that I should be listening.

– Grace

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

🚘 Driving today? Check the current traffic situation via Google, and find DriveBC’s latest updates.

🛣 Click here for links to road cameras across the Fraser Valley, including those for the Coquihalla, Highway 7, Hope-Princeton, Fraser Canyon, and Highway 1 in Langley and Abbotsford.

NEWS

The election to come: Abbotsford

No longer a stronghold, Abbotsford will be a political battleground this October when voters head to the polls.

It has been decades since a provincial election was accompanied by so much uncertainty over just who might represent residents in the BC legislature.

Demographic shifts, a prominent retirement, redrawn ridings, and a surge of popularity for the BC Conservatives mean that any one of three parties could end up with a majority of the central Fraser Valley’s seats.

Earlier this month, we considered the upcoming races in Chilliwack and the eastern valley.

• Today, Tyler looks at the outlook for races in three ridings in Abbotsford and Mission.

Related

Need to Know

🌲 Two UFV professors will speak about chronic pain on Tuesday in Chilliwack [Chilliwack Progress] / We wrote in October about the pair’s research into how brain processes influence the experience of pain [FVC]

🚨 Police are investigating gunshots heard at a home in Langley on Friday morning [CTV]

🔥 A fire damaged three RVs in the Chilliwack River Valley early Saturday morning [Chilliwack Progress]

🎆 A crowd turned out to celebrate Lunar New Year at a Langley library [Langley Advance Times]

👮‍♂️ Abbotsford police were part of a large investigation that resulted in eight people arrested and the confiscation of a “phenomenal” amount of drug-making chemicals [Abbotsford News]; one of the men arrested was charged in connection with the shooting of an Abbotsford man last year [Abbotsford News]

🏍 A Mission teen won an Alberta motocross event [Mission Record]

⚖ A man has been charged in the 2023 fatal shooting of an Abbotsford man in Burnaby [Global]

🚔 Abbotsford police say they foiled a plot by three gangsters to eliminate rivals [Abbotsford News]

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The Agenda

Yale teacher wills nearly $40,000 to arts and culture programs in local schools

Allen Porter, a former Yale teacher, left more than $38,000 to fund cultural activities in schools in the Fraser Canyon and District of Kent after his death in 2021.

So far, funding from Porter’s estate has been used to pay for several big music and theatre projects, including a grand piano for the Agassiz Elementary-Secondary band program; a middle school theatre program in Kent; the Chilliwack School of Performing Arts’ production of Descendants; and a schoolwide theatre workshop for Harrison Elementary, among other projects.

Not all the projects are solely fine-arts focused. High school seniors at Boston Bar Elementary-Secondary will get $8,000 to plant a garden alongside local Elders. Hope Secondary students will receive funding to venture west on a series of field trips, including one to the Chilliwack Cultural Centre, one to the Tashme Museum, and one to the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

More than $38,000 has been portioned out—but the bequest in Porter’s will is actually even larger. The Fraser-Cascades School District said that a second round of submissions will be requested from local schools until all the money has been spent.

Porter was a graduate of the music education program at Washington State. He would go on to teach in schools across the west coast of North America, including classrooms in Alaska, Prince George, and Mackenzie. He moved to Hope in the 1970s and spent 24 years teaching in the Fraser-Cascades School District.

Read about some of the other great teachers in the Fraser Valley in our ongoing series here.

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🗓 Things to do

🎞️ Movie: Mission’s Reel on the River film series continues with My Mother’s Men, a Canadian French-language film, at SilverCity Cinema on Monday, Feb. 26. Details online.

🏒 Hockey: The Abbotsford Canucks host the Colorado Eagles at the Abbotsford Centre on Tuesday, Feb. 27 and Wednesday, Feb. 28. Details online.

👗 Cinderella: Mission Secondary’s musical theatre department presents Cinderella, starting Thursday, Feb. 29 at the Clarke Theatre. Details online.

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Catch up

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