‘Our lives have drastically modified’: Updates to 10 of our prime tales

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Annually, reporters on the Vancouver Solar and The Province publish lots of of tales each huge and small, however some resonate particularly deeply with readers.

Listed below are 10 of our most-read tales of 2023, together with updates on what’s occurred since they made the information.

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1. Father stabbed to dying outdoors Vancouver Starbucks after asking man to not vape close to his toddler

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The stabbing of a person defending his small daughter on a downtown Vancouver Starbucks patio — a grisly assault that was filmed and uploaded to the web — saddened and shocked many in B.C. and past.

The guts-wrenching, public dying of Paul Schmidt, who was killed March 26 after asking a stranger to not vape close to his three-year-old’s stroller, left his daughter Erica with out a father and his fiancée Ashley Umali with out her associate.

UPDATE: “Our lives have drastically modified,” Umali stated in an e mail.

They now keep away from downtown, particularly the busy Pender and Granville nook the place Schmidt was killed. The household used to go downtown usually as a result of Erica cherished the play space of the principle Vancouver Public Library, stated her mother.

Erica, who was typically photographed cheek-to-cheek together with her dad, now has hassle sleeping, stated Umali. The teenager suffers separation nervousness every time her mother leaves. Umali is ready to stay at dwelling with Erica, because of GoFundMe donations — which totalled about $197,000 — made in Schmidt’s reminiscence. The vast majority of the cash might be deposited right into a fund for Erica, stated Paul’s mom, Kathy Schmidt.

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Now elevating a toddler as a single mother, Umali struggles with grief.

“There are such a lot of days that I’ll cry as he gained’t come again,” she stated. “Might he relaxation in peace and we are able to have justice for Paul.

“This shouldn’t have occurred to somebody harmless. We’ve got misplaced somebody so pricey in our lives. He was a household man who adored what he did, out and in.”

“I’ve my days,” stated Kathy. “It’s getting more durable round Christmas.”

“Paul was within the prime of his life,” Kathy stated of her son, who had labored for years for Jiffy Transfer, a Burnaby transferring firm. “He and his daughter and his fiancée had every part to look ahead to.”

She stated Erica gained’t converse with anybody however her mom, not even when she spends days together with her grandmother. “She appears up at her daddy’s image and she or he simply has these unhappy, unhappy eyes. She does perceive her daddy is just not coming dwelling once more.”

Christmas was a particular time on the younger household’s home, with Paul doing all the adorning and cooking, Kathy stated.

“He had created Christmas traditions for his household,” she stated. “As an alternative of a gingerbread home, he made a Package Kat home with Erica.”

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For Kathy, the lack of Paul is much more crushing as a result of her youthful son and solely different little one, Andrew, died at age 33 underneath tragic circumstances, almost two years to the day when Paul, 37, was killed.

“I’ve been modified eternally,” she stated. “I assumed I had been modified by Andrew’s dying. It’s virtually insufferable.”

She stated she is going to keep robust for Ashley as a result of “if I crumbled, she would crumble.”

Kathy stated the horrifying stabbing was made worse as a result of “nobody helped him” and bystanders filmed the assault and uploaded it to the net. These actions had been known as out on x.com by Vancouver police and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim, who urged social media customers to not view or repost the video.

Inderdeep Singh Goyal, 32, has been charged with second-degree homicide. He was denied bail and is to stay in custody till his trial. His subsequent look is a pretrial convention in March. A preliminary trial, to find out if there’s sufficient proof, is scheduled for April.

Kathy will attend the trial for the person accused of killing her son, however stated Goyal ought to have been charged with first-degree homicide.

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A cost of first-degree homicide requires premeditation. Convictions for each first- and second-degree homicide carry computerized life sentences, however parole is feasible after 10 years for second diploma and after 25 years for first diploma.

Kathy stated she is going to inform the court docket what the lack of her son has meant to her in her sufferer affect assertion if Goyal is convicted.

— Susan Lazaruk

2. Considered one of Vancouver’s costliest properties has been taken over by squatters

For almost a yr, campers had been trespassing on considered one of three vacant side-by-side single-family heaps on Belmont Avenue on Vancouver’s west facet. They’d arrange a tidy, however makeshift shelter on the property.

The massive heaps with a few of the metropolis’s most spectacular ocean and mountain views had been assessed at a complete of almost $60 million. However in 2021, they had been listed for $80.7 million. The excessive asking worth mirrored a suggestion the prime land could possibly be redeveloped into greater than two dozen multi-family properties.

After the Metropolis of Vancouver stated there was no coverage for such improvement and the luxurious market flattened, a brand new realtor put the three heaps again in the marketplace in 2023 for round $47 million.

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They had been owned by B.C. numbered corporations with a sole director named as Edison Washington, who lists a West Vancouver tackle and has been related to purchasing $152 million in Vancouver residential properties since 2011.

His property supervisor informed Postmedia that campers had been altering the locks on the gate on the entrance to one of many heaps, and there had been some heated confrontations when he introduced potential consumers.

Veteran realtor Malcolm Hasman stated that squatting in empty personal properties isn’t new. For the campers, it’s a safer choice. However for the residents on Belmont Avenue — and in addition elsewhere town — it will be very unsettling, he stated.

Police later responded to studies {that a} camper was standing in the course of the highway waving a pruning noticed. They eliminated the locks and momentary constructions.

UPDATE: In August, Hasman reported that every one three heaps had been offered for $39 million.

— Joanne Lee-Younger, with a file from David Carrigg

3. Vancouver landlord ‘pleads for widespread sense’ after being hit with a $69,000 empty properties tax invoice

Vancouver landlord Joanna Colettis pleaded “for widespread sense” after being hit with a $69,000 empty properties tax invoice.

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She confronted the rising invoice that threatened her skill to maintain renting out her six models, which is the objective of the tax.

Colettis reached out to Postmedia in June after studying about renters in Delta who spoke up about shedding their dwelling as a result of their landlord was hit with a $96,000 provincial hypothesis and emptiness tax invoice despite the fact that the tenants have occupied the home for nearly seven years. To pay the tax, the owner was going to promote the home.

Colettis, who has been renting out suites on her property close to Cambie Avenue for the reason that Nineteen Eighties, was nervous one thing comparable may occur to her.

In January, she was chosen for an audit to show the suites had been occupied in 2021. The town requires paperwork from tenants to show occupancy of a residential property for six months or extra within the interval that’s in query. She confirmed Postmedia binders of varieties gathered from her tenants, together with cellphone payments, drivers’ licences, social insurance coverage numbers, tax paperwork, a enterprise licence and rental agreements.

The Metropolis of Vancouver on the time stated it was unable to supply particulars of particular person circumstances.

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UPDATE: The story drew a flurry of letters from different landlords and householders navigating comparable audits by town.

Colettis final spoke to Postmedia in July, saying that she was overwhelmed by the scenario along with caring for her aged mother and father.

— Joanne Lee-Younger

4. Delta household fears shedding their dwelling of seven years resulting from B.C. ‘emptiness’ tax

James and Angela Bates feared shedding the house they’d lived in for seven years after their landlord was hit with a $96,000 tax invoice underneath B.C.’s hypothesis and emptiness tax.

The couple’s head-scratcher story was printed in early June.

James Bates stated he couldn’t perceive how a legislation meant to assist households discover housing may result in his household shedding their dwelling. The tax was launched by the province in 2018 to cut back empty properties and residential properties.

However despite the fact that Bates offered a provincial auditor with receipts displaying he’d rented and occupied the North Delta dwelling for a number of years, together with payments, financial institution statements and even supply receipts from the likes of SkipTheDishes, the province filed a pending lien on the property for $96,000 for failure to pay the emptiness tax.

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Bates stated his landlord was informed by the auditor to pay the lien and, if he was profitable in an attraction, he would get the cash again. He deliberate to promote as a substitute.

Bates stated he anticipated whoever purchased the home to both tear it down or “triple” the lease.

UPDATE: Bates’s predictions would come true only a month later.

The rental dwelling was shortly offered and the couple, together with their 11-month-old child, obtained a two-month eviction discover on July 1. The home was demolished in October.

“To discover a new place was brutal,” Bates stated in a followup interview earlier this month.

They finally discovered a brand new dwelling in North Delta for nearly thrice the lease.

“Earlier than we had been ready to avoid wasting cash, so we had been getting forward,” he stated. “Now, we’re simply staying afloat.”

— Glenda Luymes

5. ‘He was really distinctive’: Mountie killed in Coquitlam was embellished officer, a father of six

RCMP Const. Rick O’Brien, a 51-year-old Mountie with seven years of service, was shot and killed on Sept. 22 when a police search at a Coquitlam condominium advanced escalated right into a lethal gun battle.

Two different officers had been harm and a suspect was additionally taken to hospital with critical accidents.

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O’Brien was remembered for his devotion to group, each throughout his police profession and earlier when he labored with youth.

“He was a extremely embellished police officer and he was acknowledged for his bravery,” stated Supt. Wendy Mehat, officer in cost at Ridge Meadows RCMP, O’Brien’s dwelling detachment.

“He was really distinctive, a tough employee and a very good human being. His dying makes no sense and heartbreaking. He merely went to work in the present day and was killed preserving his group secure.”

Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald, commanding officer of the B.C. RCMP, stated the policing group was “gutted” — particularly as O’Brien was killed weeks earlier than the primary anniversary of the deadly stabbing in Burnaby of RCMP Const. Shaelyn Yang.

UPDATE: Nicholas Bellemare, 25, of Coquitlam has been charged with first-degree homicide and tried homicide of the injured officers. Bellemare is due in court docket on Jan. 16 to repair a date for trial.

Ridge Meadows RCMP Cpl. Julie Klaussner stated “shedding a police officer is horrible and one thing that the detachment won’t ever get better from.

“Rick O’Brien was a good friend, colleague and beloved member of this detachment and he’ll eternally be missed and by no means forgotten, having paid the last word sacrifice.”

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A committee has been shaped to honour O’Brien, however plans haven’t been finalized.

— Joseph Ruttle

6. Jim Pattison’s former West Vancouver dwelling on the market for $1. Situations apply

Final June, the District of West Vancouver put B.C. enterprise magnate Jim Pattison’s household dwelling up on the market for $1. The catch? It wasn’t the land that was on the market, solely the house. Whoever purchased the home needed to transfer it off of the property.

The district had bought the waterfront lot in January as a part of a long-running plan to create a steady public walkway and park alongside the Argyle waterfront. Pattison’s former dwelling was one of many two remaining waterfront homes between Ambleside Park and John Lawson Park.

The district’s desire was for the home to be salvaged.

UPDATE: Regardless of extending the time interval for bidders to file an expression of curiosity, no takers got here ahead.

On Dec. 4, the district chosen Verna Deconstruction to take the house aside and take away it from the positioning.

As an alternative of demolishing the home and sending the ensuing waste to the landfill, Verna Deconstruction will take the constructing aside and get better usable supplies for reuse and upcycling. Home equipment, furnishings and cupboards might be donated to charities, when applicable.

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Building and demolition waste make up one-third of the waste in Metro Vancouver landfills, in accordance with Metro.

No begin date for the deconstruction has been set but however the course of is anticipated to take 4 weeks, plus the vacation break.

The district plans to show the property into waterfront park area as soon as Pattison’s previous house is eliminated.

— Nathan Griffiths

7. UN gangster shot lifeless after leaving South Vancouver marriage ceremony reception

Seven months after Amarpreet (Chucky) Samra was shot to dying in Might outdoors a relative’s South Vancouver marriage ceremony, nobody has been charged with killing the 28-year-old United Nations gangster.

As his household was nonetheless grieving the lack of one son, his elder brother Ravinder, who attended the identical marriage ceremony, was gunned down outdoors his rental dwelling in Richmond two months later. That homicide additionally stays unsolved.

The siblings had been among the many UN gangsters locked in a violent battle with rivals from the Brothers Keepers gang. Each Samras brothers have been linked to different shootings within the long-running gang battle.

It was so tense through the provincewide battle that police issued a poster within the spring of 2021 with a lot of images and names, together with a warning for the general public to avoid any of these featured. Each Samras had been included.

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That very same spring, a killer arrived outdoors Chucky Samra’s household dwelling in Surrey. However the gunman mistakenly adopted a neighbour with the same automobile. Bikramdeep Singh Randhawa, 29, was shot to dying in a car parking zone on one hundred and twentieth Avenue after he had purchased groceries and labored out on the health club throughout the road. Nobody has been charged within the homicide of the favored correctional officer, though Delta police have recognized suspects linked to the BK gang.

UPDATE: Even in dying, the Samra brothers stay topics of a B.C. authorities lawsuit filed earlier this yr by the director of civil forfeiture, which alleges a Richmond home owned by the brothers and others was bought with the proceeds of crime and ought to be forfeited.

— Kim Bolan

8. Excessive court docket justice Russell Brown underneath investigation after altercation at Arizona resort

In February, it emerged that Russell Brown, then a Supreme Courtroom of Canada justice, was on a depart of absence.

The general public was left at nighttime as to why.

The following month, Postmedia columnist Ian Mulgrew broke the story that Brown was being investigated by Canada’s judicial watchdog over allegations he acquired right into a drunken altercation at an Arizona resort.

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Brown, who had attended a gala to honour former Canadian Supreme Courtroom justice Louise Arbour, stated the allegations had been “demonstrably false.”

Because the Canadian Judicial Council investigated, questions lingered about how allegations of misconduct are dealt with and the necessity for larger transparency.

Richard Wagner, the chief justice of the Supreme Courtroom, stated: “There’s one thing opaque proper now. And I’m not snug with that.”

UPDATE: In June, Brown introduced he was retiring, successfully ending the council’s probe into the allegations.

That very same month, the federal authorities introduced adjustments to the Judges Act that it stated would deliver larger transparency and accountability. Beneath the brand new procedures, much less critical complaints might be reviewed by a three-person panel that may have authority to impose sanctions, corresponding to a public apology or persevering with schooling.

Extra critical allegations might be dealt with by a five-person panel that may maintain public hearings into complaints and have the choice of recommending elimination from the bench. Each panels will embody members of the general public. Judges will nonetheless have the ability to attraction panel selections, however not by way of federal courts.

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“The brand new course of will cut back prices and, importantly, will reduce down on the variety of delays brought on by judicial overview which have occurred in current reminiscence as soon as an inquiry is underway,” Johanna Laporte, the Canadian Judicial Council’s director of communications, wrote in an e mail. The council now additionally should report yearly the variety of complaints it receives and the way they’re resolved.

In November, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced that Mary Moreau, chief justice of the Courtroom of King’s Bench of Alberta, would substitute Brown.

— Douglas Quan

9. B.C.’s housing plan goals to extend ‘missing-middle’ housing, legalize all secondary suites

As Premier David Eby and Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon stood in April in entrance of a brand new, 34-unit townhouse and house advanced constructed on 4 single-family heaps in Victoria, Eby laid out his imaginative and prescient of a plan that some decried because the dying knell for the single-family neighbourhood whereas others praised as an bold technique to spice up the provision of housing.

By November, these proposed reforms grew to become legislation by way of Invoice 44. By July 2024, all B.C. municipalities might be compelled to green-light as much as six models on a single-family lot in areas near transit.

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UPDATE: With the laws underneath the microscope within the remaining days of the autumn legislative session, Opposition MLAs peppered Kahlon with questions on potential unintended penalties of elevated density on single-family heaps. B.C. Inexperienced MLA Adam Olsen, for instance, nervous that the federal government’s upzoning laws will truly elevate the worth of single-family properties as householders jockey to promote to the highest-bidding developer.

The laws does nothing to extend the provision of below-market housing for folks priced out of the market, stated Olsen and SFU housing researcher Andy Yan. A stark instance of this was within the townhouse improvement that offered the backdrop for Eby’s April announcement, the place a three-bedroom, two rest room townhouse is listed for $999,000 in a metropolis the place the common worth of the single-family house is slightly below $1 million.

Regardless of these issues, the NDP authorities used its majority to ram by way of the laws. Because the clock ticks till the October 2024 election, the massive take a look at might be whether or not the brand new legislation interprets into extra properties.

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— Katie DeRosa

10. Dan Fumano: How a Vancouver neighbourhood fought, and defeated, a daycare

Vancouver’s child-care scarcity isn’t a brand new problem. However when Postmedia Information reported in August a few native daycare operator’s rejection by metropolis corridor, the story appeared to the touch a nerve, and helped deliver extra prominence to a difficulty that has lengthy been irritating Vancouver mother and father.

Many readers, in Vancouver and different cities round North America, expressed outrage that metropolis corridor denied the daycare’s software to increase an present eight-child facility to serve one other eight youngsters, contemplating Vancouver’s big shortfall of licensed areas. The town’s board of variance rejected the applying from Douglas Park Academy, citing issues over parking and neighbours’ objections.

The Metropolis of Vancouver has labored for years to enhance entry to little one care however municipal employees and politicians say the problem gained extra prominence this yr, particularly across the topic of enabling daycares like Douglas Park to open and increase in low-density residential neighbourhoods like theirs.

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Metropolis councillors contacted the Douglas Park operators to see what could possibly be performed to assist them. However, sadly, they quickly realized that regardless of the general public uproar, there was little hope of approval — a minimum of underneath town’s present guidelines.

UPDATE: These guidelines may change quickly. In November, council directed employees to overtake bylaws aiming to allow extra licensed daycare areas, particularly mentioning exploring choices for residential neighbourhoods by way of measures together with eradicating parking necessities.

Douglas Park proprietor Lisa McCormick welcomed this route. Nevertheless it’s unlikely to provide any significant change any time quickly for her software, she stated, and, within the meantime, “we’re form of ready in limbo.”

— Dan Fumano

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