Wednesday - Feb. 20, 2024 - Jack the Jam Man

🌧 High 11C

Good morning!

I watched three movies over the weekend: the 1974 hostage movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, and the Rambo movie, Rambo: First Blood. It was my first time seeing Rambo, a movie that has its own place both in moviemaking lore and, thanks to its filming in Hope, the history of the Fraser Valley. It did not exactly meet my assumptions about a Rambo movie, but that’s to its credit. (I assume the sequels are why I expected more wanton killing and less nuance.)

The Bond movie was OK too, but Pelham is the best of the lot. I’m not one for overly romanticizing old cultural periods, but the sheer volume of incredible crime movies from the first part of the ’70s is something else. I’d love to hear your favourites. (I’ve gone through Dog Day Afternoon, the French Connection, Chinatown and various others over the past year.)

Thanks for our new yearly Insider members Sharon, Michele, John, and Shannon. If you want to ensure we can continue making this newsletter, join them here for just a couple bucks a week.

– Tyler

Traffic & Weather

🌤 Local forecast: Langley | Chilliwack | Abbotsford | Hope

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🛣 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

Why Jack makes so much jam

Jack Ethier’s last pot of marmalade is bubbling on the stove.

It’s the final batch of the specific type of oranges Ethier needs for marmalade. Earlier this winter, a priest from Vancouver called him up and said he had found crates of Seville oranges in a market downtown. Did Jack want to make them into marmalade? Of course he did.

Outside Ethier’s kitchen window, the sun is setting behind the hills. Inside, golden light illuminates clusters of colourful jars full of translucent orange marmalade, red quince jelly, and other jewel-toned jams. Each one is labeled with a blue sticker.

Every year, Ethier, an 84-year-old retired principal, makes about 2,000 cups of jams and jellies in his kitchen in Mission. He brings the jars—eight or nine dozen at a time—to the food bank every two weeks. He says that paying out of pocket for expenses like sugar, pectin, and jars is his contribution to people in need in Mission. The project started as a routine to keep him busy when he needed to start staying close to home. It has since become a routine and a bit of an impulse—one declared by the labels on each jar: “Jack’s Gotta Jam.”

• Today, Grace writes about exactly why Jack has got to jam.

• We first heard about Jack from a Fraser Valley Current reader (and Insider member). If you know someone local who is doing something amazing, tell us about them by replying to this email.

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Need to Know

📞 Fraser Canyon residents were left without landline, cell service and and 9-1-1 Monday [Ecomm/Facebook]

🔎 Mission Police are looking for help finding a missing woman [Mission RCMP]

🔊 The BC throne speech promised eviction protections for renters and assistance for first-time home-buyers [CBC]

👉 Frozen pipes damaged the Aldergrove museum—but didn’t harm any artifacts [Aldergrove Star]

😶 A Hope teacher has been disciplined for throwing a charging device at a student—then trying to talk the student out of reporting it [Hope Standard]

🗳 Former Chilliwack councillor Sue Knott will be running for BC United in the Chilliwack-Cultus Lake riding [Chilliwack Progress] / Last week, we looked at the state of the upcoming races in the area [FVC]

🚔 A man was arrested after a reported shooting near Cultus Lake [Fraser Valley Today]

🗳 The owner of an Aldergrove auto-wrecking company left a half-million dollars—and maybe more—to an employee who murdered a woman in the ‘80s [Aldergrove Star]

🚔 Police were called in after threats against a Langley high school [Langley Advance Times]

The Agenda

US court will have veto power over Black Press sale

An American court has sided with the US government pension agency seeking to recoup millions of dollars owed by Canadian newspaper chain Black Press.

In a decision made last Wednesday and posted online over the weekend, an American judge declared that a US court should be in charge of determining the future of the newspaper chain’s assets in Washington State, Hawaii, and Alaska. The ruling is a win for the US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the US federal agency that assumed the management of more than $40 million of pension debt when Black Press was unable to pay. That link is a remnant of the chain’s disastrous 2006 purchase of a daily newspaper in Akron, Ohio. The ruling is a hiccup for the company’s potential new owners, who sought to acquire the company while walking away from those debts.

Black Press has previously announced a proposed sale to a pair of Canadian investment companies and a small US publishing company. Legal documents reveal that the sale would pay back all of Black Press’s formalized loans, while leaving PBGC empty-handed. Black Press operates newspaper divisions in both the US and Canada and has applied for creditor protection from courts in both countries. But it asked the US to leave the oversight of the process to the Canadian courts, saying that it was a fundamentally Canadian company with branches south of the border.

Earlier this month, PBGC objected to that arrangement and asked the US Bankruptcy Court to declare that it has jurisdiction over the Black Press subsidiaries that operate papers in the US. (We reported on the application last week. You can read the story here.) PBGC said Black Press’s American divisions were mostly independent entities that were fundamentally American. Last Wednesday, the US court agreed. Its ruling means any sale of the company’s US papers will need to get the OK of an American judge. PBGC clearly hopes that will mean it gets more money than envisioned in the proposed ‘stalking horse’ sale.

What comes next depends partly on how much someone is willing to pay for Black Press. Last Friday was the deadline for potential owners to submit qualifying bids for Black Press and its assets. To qualify for a subsequent auction, a bid had to promise to repay some $715 million in debts. If any bid were to hit that target, an auction would take place on Feb. 26. The sale would then need to be confirmed by the court. If no bid were to meet that threshold, the ‘stalking horse’ sale would be left the default winner.

But by effectively splitting the legal authority over the company’s assets between the two countries, the US court ruling may change that. The US court has issued a stay of proceedings on the sale of Black Press’s American subsidiaries and its assets. Lifting that will require the approval of the same court. And that court suggested that it will be watching how much of the proceeds of any proposed sale end up going to US lenders like PBGC. In its ruling, the court said the stay is necessary to prevent Black Press’s US subsidiaries from being sold off in a way that would undermine “efforts to achieve an equitable result” for creditors on both sides of the border.

🤝 Now hiring

• School counsellor at Langley School District

• Event manager at Abbotsford Centre

• Peer support worker, substance use services at Fraser Health in Abbotsford

• Skate patroller at the City of Chilliwack

• Head coach, Ninja/Parkour Program at Fraser Valley Gymnastix in Chilliwack

Hiring in the Fraser Valley? Reply back and let us know!

📸 Current Cam

Each week we showcase a different photo from across the valley and invite readers to share their best guesses about where it was taken.

Think you know where this week’s Current Cam was taken? Fill out this form.

🗓 Things to do

The blues: The Fraser Valley Blues Society hosts the Gale Force Blues Band Saturday at 7pm at the Eagles Hall in Abbotsford. Details online.

WHL hockey: The Vancouver Giants host the Kamloops Blazers Feb. 24 at the Langley Events Centre. Tickets online.

History burgers: Corky’s Irish Pub in Chilliwack is selling burgers to support Heritage Chilliwack’s programs and projects Feb. 22 from 5 to 8pm. Details online.

Catch up

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