Thursday - Sept. 19, 2024 - Farmers asking for help to protect water rights

⛅ High 19C

Good morning!

It is a plum jam weekend. Each year, my grandparents give me a giant cardboard box of blue damson plums after our long weekend visit. We eat as many as we can until they get a little too ripe. Then, it’s jam time.

Blue damsons are, in my opinion, the best plums out there—both to eat fresh and to cook with. This year, my sister gave me a portion of her plums, with the specific request of turning them into jam. So it looks like I have a big sticky project to undertake on Saturday. Thankfully, jam is the easiest of the canning activities, and stirring a big pot of fruit is a good activity for kids—as long as they don’t stick their fingers in while it’s cooking.

(If you’re a jam-lover, feel free to revisit our story about Mission’s jam man. And in Wednesday’s newsletter, you can find a classified asking readers for donations of jam jars.)

– Grace

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Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope (We have had to temporarily change our forecast links to the Weather Network due to a technical error.)

🚘 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

Your good-news health care stories

Here at the Fraser Valley Current, we do our fair share of reporting on the bad side of health care. The excessive wait times. The increasing disease rates. The overworked staff. The underfunded facilities.

But, as respondents showed in this month’s FVC Perspectives call out, health care isn’t all doom and gloom.

We asked readers what kind of experiences they have had in local health care. Nearly 70% of people said they had positive experiences in health care nearly every time, while another 28% said their experiences had been mostly good. In fact, only one person said they had mostly negative interactions with the health care system.

So we wanted to know: what sort of good news stories have our respondents seen in local hospitals, walk-in clinics, and other health care facilities?

• Today, we share your shout-outs, successes, and overall good-news stories about health care in the Fraser Valley.

Related

Need to Know

🏠 An Indigenous conservation project on Sumas Mountain has received $20,000 in funding to collect information on the impacts of planned housing projects [Abbotsford News]

🚓 Langley police are investigating a crash that killed a 22-year-old Abbotsford motorcyclist Tuesday night [Fraser Valley Today]

🚒 A truck carrying corn feed caught fire in Chilliwack Wednesday [Chilliwack Progress]

🚍 The Mission School District has temporarily cancelled bus routes due to driver shortages [Mission Record]

🚢 The Coast Guard says the former Queen of Sidney ferry is not posing a high risk to Mission’s waters, despite its derelict condition [Mission Record] / Tyler wrote about the ship a decade ago, when the same questions and concerns existed [Mission Record]

🏆 Chilliwack swimmers brought home multiple gold medals from the BC 55+ Games [Chilliwack Progress]

🏘 Langley Mayor Eric Woodward says BC’s decision to grant extensions on housing mandates was ‘entirely political’ [Vancouver Sun] / We wrote about the FVRD getting an extension, while Langley Township didn’t, last month [FVC]

🗳 A former federal cabinet minister hoped to launch a ‘New Liberal Party of BC’ for the provincial election; Elections BC has said no to the name [CBC]

📸 CURRENT CAM: Congratulations to D’Arcy Soutar, who was the first person to correctly identify this week’s Current Cam as the Sumas Canal crossing underneath Highway 1.

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The Agenda

Farmers asking for help to protect water for agriculture

BC dairy farmers and other agriculturalists are calling on the provincial government to create an agricultural water reserve to ensure farmers have access to water during droughts.

According to BC Dairy and the BC Agriculture Council, an agricultural water reserve would prioritize water for farming purposes during droughts. They said it would be “modelled after the agricultural land reserve” but did not specify how that would look for such a fluid resource. They also called for legislation that would recognize agriculture as a distinct water use category, and for better on-site systems for water storage.

The goal is to create dedicated water rights for BC’s crops. But that may prove challenging, particularly given some of the concerns surrounding agricultural water use already.

In Sumas Prairie, farmers and others have expressed concerns about the demands on the area’s water supply, particularly as more turf farms move into the region. Van Eekelen Enterprises, which grows vegetables on 600 acres on the prairie, wrote earlier this year that farms have been using significantly more water than five years ago. (In Sumas Prairie, that means more water coming out of the area’s ditches.) The farming company warned that the city needed to work on structural improvements to irrigation, to ensure that enough water would be able to get to each farm.

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🗓 Things to do this week/end

🎸 Concert night: Juno award-winning Cara Luft will be performing at Langley's Bez Arts Hub on Friday, Sept. 20. She will be joined by special guests The Doggone Brothers and Russ Rosen. Tickets online.

💾 Tech help: Come to the City of Langley Library on Friday, Sept. 20 for some drop-in tech help starting at 10:30am. Bring your questions and remember your password to get assistance on your own devices or on the library computer. Details online.

🖼 Art day: Arts Alive returns to Mission on Saturday, Sept. 21 at several locations throughout the city. Watch pottery demonstrations, purchase artwork, and potentially win a six-week clay workshop. Details online.

Want even more? Insider members get a comprehensive events listing every Thursday, plus a weekly Saturday round-up edition with behind-the-scenes content. Becoming a member costs less than $2 a week and helps support the ongoing production of The Current’s newsletters and in-depth journalism. Become a member here.

Have an event to tell us about? Fill out this form to have it highlighted here.

Catch up

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