Police investigating rash of recent incidents in Lower Mainland

Gillian Shaw
Sun

When Mark Wong ordered a sandwich and fries at a Richmond McDonald’s recently, he didn’t expect it to cost $500.

But that’s the amount drained out of Wong’s bank account after he and co-workers had lunch at McDonald’s on Bridgeport Road near Ikea and found themselves among the victims of Canada’s super-sized debit card fraud.

Debit card fraud has more that doubled during the past three years, reaching close to $100 million in 2006.

And it’s the second time in as many weeks that a McDonald’s fast food outlet has been named as the place where debit card information was lifted.

“I had the new ham-and-Swiss sandwich with fries and a coffee, and the bill was under 10 bucks, but it cost me $500,” said Wong. “When I went to the bank, basically they said it is an epidemic — the teller said they get lots of people coming in, and that was just at my branch.”

Across Canada, banks and financial institutions reimbursed debit card customers about $95 million stolen from their accounts in 2006, up from $70 million in 2005, and $44 million in 2003.

Wong and his co-workers’ losses come on the heels of another debit card debacle when at least 100 people were victimized in a massive debit-card-skimming scam at Delta’s Scottsdale Mall. Victims there pointed to the McDonald’s Express outlet as the common place where they had all used their cards.

Wong said 12 people at his workplace alone who also ate at McDonald’s were affected by the fraud. In his case, Wong discovered $500 was withdrawn from a Toronto banking machine in the middle of the night after his lunch, using a debit card that had been created with his information and personal identification number (PIN). His bank reimbursed the stolen funds.

“I consider myself lucky because they only took $500 from me,” he wrote in an e-mail describing the theft. “Others I work with lost over $1,000. We had one person’s account totally drained.

“As a group, we are very frustrated with McDonald’s lack of security about this. So far, I have not even heard a reply after several attempts to contact McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s Canada responded to an interview request from The Vancouver Sun with an eight-line e-mail that failed to provide any explanation for the incident.

“Upon learning of these isolated situations, we responded immediately and have been in contact with local police. We will cooperate fully with their investigations,” the prepared statement read, urging people to “rest assured” the company is working to “further protect our restaurants and customers against criminal activity.”

Valerie MacLean, executive-director of the B.C. Crime Prevention Association, said the burden of responsibility for ensuring that debit card terminals haven’t been tampered with or customers’ information isn’t being lifted lies with merchants.

“Debit card fraud is on the rise,” she said. “The repercussions of these incidents are that people are going to lose confidence in using their debit cards.”

Richmond RCMP confirmed the Bridgeport McDonald’s debit card incidents, but Cpl. Peter Thiessen said that while police are investigating, they still don’t know how the fraud was carried out.

Tina Romano, spokeswoman for the Interac Association, said there are a number of ways fraudsters can use hidden equipment to copy information from the card and capture a customer’s PIN.

“Sometimes they’ll use pinhole cameras to capture you entering the PIN,” she said. “Sometimes they might involve an employee, sometimes not.”

The fraud artists can also install a skimmer that captures the information from a card without tipping off the customer that anything is amiss.

Romano said of the four billion debit card transactions per year in Canada, 99.9 per cent go through problem-free.

“Debit card fraud affects a fraction of one per cent,” she said. “Victims of debit card fraud will not suffer any financial losses because they are protected by the Canadian Code of Practice for Consumer Debit Card Services.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Credit card details are more likely to be stolen from eateries or small merchants than online, report says

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Credit-card information is the treasure of choice for today’s hackers and in the past year they have stepped up attacks that are draining hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations and individuals, according to BT Counterpane’s 2006 Attack Trends Report and 2007-2008 Crystal Ball forecast.

And while consumers worry about using their credit cards online, the reality is they face a greater risk when they use their cards at a restaurant or other brick-and-mortar merchant, says another report by AmbironTrustWave, a Chicago-based security company that conducts security audits for merchants.

Restaurants were found to offer a particularly lucrative trolling ground for credit-card fraudsters. An AmbironTrustWave review of security breaches over the past 18 months found that 62 per cent came from the food service industry.

“It was always assumed the greatest risk was ecommerce websites, whereas nowadays we are seeing more risk with merchants that don’t necessarily have an ecommerce website, but they may be connected to the Web,” said Mike Petitti, senior vice-president with AmbironTrustWave. “Largely, when we see a lot of breach cases at very small merchants, it has typically to do with the tools they are using or the third parties they are working with — the tools such as the point-of-sale application or the point-of-sale terminal.

“A merchant may say, ‘I have a very unsophisticated environment, I don’t have a website,’ and they may feel immune to the hacker out there surfing the Net, but the reality is they are just as vulnerable if not more vulnerable, than a major ecommerce website.”

Restaurants’ credit-card customers aren’t the only ones at risk. Debit-card users can also be targeted by data thieves, as evidenced by last month’s incident at a Delta McDonald’s.

A debit-card machine was reported stolen from the McDonald’s Express in Scottsdale Centre’s food court. Delta Police spokeswoman Const. Sharlene Brooks said that its investigators believed there were “in excess of 100 victims” after a number of people reported money had been withdrawn from their accounts.

McDonald’s Canada said at the time there was “no confirmation of the source of this potential breach” and “until all the facts are determined, we would caution anyone from jumping to conclusions.”

McDonald’s Canada later issued a new statement saying: “We regret the inconvenience caused by this situation and encourage anyone who has concerns to contact their financial institution.”

BT Counterpane is reporting an upsurge in attacks.

“Over the past two years — and especially in the last 12 months — we estimate, based on real-world experience, that financially motivated criminal attacks have risen fivefold and have resulted in the loss of millions of data records worldwide relating to individuals, hundreds of millions of dollars in direct financial losses, and many billions more in indirect losses in areas such as reputation and remediation,” Doug Howard, chief operating officer and Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of BTO Counterpane, said in their Attack Trends report.

The thieves may be motivated by other goals, but primarily they are seeking credit-card information and other data that’s key to the identify-theft business.

“While corporate trade secrets are an occasional target, the primary target of choice is credit- card information and personal data that can be used to commit identity theft,” Howard and Schneier said, adding that the ease of gaining access to the information can determine the targets.

The proliferation of fraud shows the perpetrators are ready to steal the information wherever they can find it.

“In a typical security breach at a restaurant, an attacker will steal cardholder information for approximately 40,000 cards — a far great number than just a typical skimming incident,” AmbironTrustWave said in its restaurant report. “And the individuals involved in these types of thefts are more than just rogue waiters.

“In many instances these attackers work for a larger international organization that uses the stolen information to create counterfeit credit cards.”

Doug Howard at Counterpane said there is no doubt the smaller operations are putting fewer resources into the protection of their assets.

“I would argue that big companies should be able to apply more security because they have more money to apply to it. The worst position to be in is a single restaurant that keeps all the credit card information locally.”

Skimming, or the practice of using a skimming device to record the information on the magnetic strip on a credit card, is still going on even though more sophisticated criminals opt for the larger volume returns that come with hacking into databases.

Michael D’Sa, senior manager, data security and investigations at Visa Canada, said criminals will pay restaurant employees to skim the cards or even go as far as taking restaurant jobs themselves to gain access to the information.

“Some of these skimming incidents are more domestic criminal groups,” said D’Sa. “It is still worth their while because they can pull in 200 accounts in a day.”

Howard points out the impact can go beyond the immediate financial loss, affecting the targeted company’s relationship with both the credit-card companies and consumers.

“One of the things we’ve seen overall is an increased attitude towards the retailers that they are not doing a good job,” said Howard. He said while the merchants could be hit with fines, the more effective consequence is the potential loss of the credit- card business.

“That is definitely the bat they (credit-card companies) hit them over the head with — ‘I won’t let you do transactions any more,'” said Howard.

D’Sa said that while Visa prefers to educate and inform merchants to help them safeguard against credit-card fraud, he said the company will act if a merchant or restaurant is failing to protect cardholder information.

“If there are incidents where we find merchants, restaurants, even processors — anybody who is in gross violation of our security requirements — we have the right to terminate their ability to accept or process Visa transactions,” he said. “In the past we have invoked that right.

“That is the ultimate penalty.”

Consumers can also be unforgiving. Howard cited a study that found 40 per cent of consumers surveyed said they might discontinue a relationship with a vendor if their credit card was compromised by that company. Another 20 per cent said they had already stopped doing business with a company over that.

The credit-card industry has introduced a new chip technology in an effort to thwart credit card fraud. Trials of the chip cards are under way in Canada with full roll-out expected to be complete by 2010. Instead of swiping a card with a magnetic strip, card holders will have a card with a computer chip embedded in it and they will have to enter a personal identification number at the point of sale.

While the chip cards won’t prevent criminals using stolen identity information from obtaining new credit cards, D’Sa said the technology does address the largest category of credit-card fraud, which is counterfeiting.

“The data is encrypted on the chip so it is virtually impossible to copy,” he said.

The new technology also addresses the lost and stolen card category, which accounts for 14 per cent of the losses. Card users will have to know a PIN, just as with a debit card, so someone using a stolen card won’t simply be able to try faking a signature to get a card accepted.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Stingray populations explode with the demise of great sharks

Margaret Munro
Sun

Huge schools of cownose rays, metre-wide creatures with poisonous stingers on their tails, are cruising the Atlantic coast in unprecedented numbers, wiping out scallop beds and threatening oysters and clams.

And half a world away in Japan, the population of longheaded eagle rays has exploded and is devastating lucrative wild and farmed shellfish beds, according to a Canada-U.S. research team that has linked the soaring number of rays with the demise of the great sharks.

“Lopping off the top predator has had some completely unforeseen consequences,” says marine biologist Julia Baum of Dalhousie University, co-author of the study published in the journal Science today.

She and her colleagues show huge declines in large predatory sharks, such as the great whites and hammerheads, have corresponded with an explosion in the number of rays, skates and other creatures the sharks used to keep in check.

The most dramatic example is the cownose ray, which the scientists estimate is now close to 20 times more common than it was in 1970s.

An estimated 40 million cownose rays now migrate up and down the Atlantic coast in tight, hungry schools. “They pack in side-to-side, and stacked like sardines,” says Baum.

Or as Charles Peterson, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, puts it: “They look like a starship fleet on some sort of fantastic space voyage” as they migrate up and down the coast.

He says the rays have wiped out North Carolina’s bay scallop fishery, which has been closed for three years, and have been destroying oysters and clam beds. They have taken to digging into the seafloor with their long, pointed pectoral fins to get at buried shellfish. In the process, the rays are destroying seagrass beds that are a critical nursery for many fish and shellfish species.

Cownose rays are hard to miss as they migrate through shallow coastal waters. But the researchers say their population boom is just one example of the ecological “distortion” caused by the loss of the sharks — a distortion they believe can be only corrected by protecting the great sharks, which are killed by the millions each year.

The new study, based on detailed fisheries surveys from the eastern seaboard dating back to 1970, shows that there have been sharp increases in the populations of 12 species of rays, skates and small sharks that used to be heavily preyed on by large sharks.

Baum says little is known about the biology, travels and diets of most of the creatures.

Baum and Ransom Myers, lead author of today’s report who died this week in Halifax, made headlines with a 2003 report that showed the great sharks are in steep decline.

Shark fins are highly valued in Asian markets. The fabled predators also are killed as by-catch in the tuna and swordfish fishery.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Surrey man’s device promises to dramatically reduce injuries from falls

Michael Kane
Sun

A Surrey man’s award-winning invention promises to dramatically reduce the carnage caused by wobbly ladders.

The Basemate Ladder Leveller, developed by Martin Dennis, is an ingenious arc of hardened steel that cuts the risk of falls by allowing ladders to remain stable on uneven ground.

Opposing locks on each side of the arc replace the feet of a standard ladder. As the locks are released, the arc slides over until its rubber treads are firmly on the ground while the ladder stays plumb.

Necessity was the mother of this invention, said Dennis, the 49-year-old proprietor of Surrey’s Precision Gutters.

Not only were some of his workers among the hundreds of Canadians sent to emergency rooms each year as a result of falls, they were losing time digging out ground and placing blocks in uncertain attempts to stabilize ladders.

“The whole premise of the design is that it is very, very quick to set up,” Dennis said in an interview Monday. “You just lean your ladder up, make sure it is plumb, release one lock by tapping it with your toes, and the arc slides over.”

While quickly adjusting to uneven terrain, the Basemate also provides a wider, more stable platform for the ladder.

Dennis previously manufactured ultra-light aircraft kits at Spectrum Aircraft and shipped them around the world for home assembly. He sold the company in the mid-’80s.

After getting into the gutter business, he spent several years developing the Basemate, with the help of his brother, Adam, an aircraft engineer in Victoria who supplied expert knowledge of materials and testing procedures.

The Basemate was named the most innovative product at the Canadian Hardware and Building Materials Show in Toronto in 2001.

But marketing proved a challenge for Dennis — “it’s a very difficult thing to do and it’s not my expertise” — until he sold the rights to Vancouver’s Steve Kummer, a specialist in new market opportunities. Dennis will collect royalties if the Basemate proves as successful as Kummer believes it will.

“The minute I saw it I just knew it was something amazing,” Kummer said Monday.

The item is being manufactured in Shanghai and distributed in Canada by Vancouver’s Holland Imports Inc., at a recommended price of $79.99.

Retailers of the first shipment, which arrived earlier this month, include some Tim-BR Mart building stores and True Value hardware stores. It will be more widely available next month as more shipments arrive, said Bill Lawrie, the buyer at Holland Imports.

Kummer believes the Basemate is a B.C. success story that will catch on around the world. He has signed up another distributor in the U.K. and is in negotiations for half a dozen other European countries, as well as Australia and Japan.

Similar requirements and testing standards made the U.K. an obvious next market, Kummer said. His strategy is to turn to the U.S. when the product has been proven elsewhere and will be more readily accepted.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Scientists now able to touch, see and manipulate some of nature’s tiniest particles

Richard Foot
Sun

University of Alberta, a brash, imposing upstart amid the older faculties of physics, chemistry and engineering.

Inside this glass and steel fortress, a series of locked doors lead down gleaming white corridors to laboratories housing

$45-million worth of the most sophisticated microscopes on the planet. Here, scientists are doing what Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein could only have dreamed: they’re playing with actual atoms, pushing around molecules and creating entirely new kinds of matter.

Welcome to the brave new world of nanotechnology, where for the first time in human history, scientists, once relegated to theorizing about atoms and molecules, can now touch, see and even manipulate some of the smallest particles in nature.

More importantly, researchers are engineering a new galaxy of products and technologies with the power, some say, to transform society in the same way plastics and computers did.

“It’s reasonable to say it’s the next technological revolution,” says Robert Wolkow, one of the star physicists who uses the million-dollar microscopes at the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT), the federal research institute that opened last summer at the university.

“Will this revolution take 10 or 40 years? I can’t foretell the time scale,” says Wolkow. “Certainly within my lifetime there will be very big changes as a result of it.”

The prefix “nano” comes from the Greek word for dwarf, and is scientific shorthand for nanometre, one billionth of a metre.

How small is a single nanometre? Far too small for humans to envisage. The head of a pin is a million nanometres wide. A human hair, 80,000 nanometres thick.

Nanotechnology’s power lies in the fact ordinary materials behave in extraordinary ways and take on different properties when they’re nano-sized.

“What makes nanotechnology so exciting is that as you reduce the size of a piece of material, something interesting happens,” says John Preston, director of the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research at McMaster University.

“Take a piece of gold, my wife’s wedding band, and cut it in half. It looks the same . . . but gold is gold no matter how small you cut it, until you get down into the nanometre range, and then the properties start to change. The colours change, the magnetic and electronic properties change.”

A gram of gold will melt at a much higher temperature, for instance, than 100 nanometres of gold.

Scientists are now trying to exploit this arsenal of new properties to engineer materials and applications never before considered possible: computer memories powered by carbon molecules rather than silicon chips; nanoparticles that can travel the bloodstream, delivering lethal drugs to specific cancer cells while leaving the rest of the body alone; highly efficient solar cells that may one day turn the sun into our main source of energy.

Aided by amazing tools such as the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, nano-engineers say they’re on the cusp of making every material we wear, touch and use both stronger, lighter and better suited to its purpose.

“There’s a sense of excitement around here at the enormous possibilities,” says Shannon Jones, the spokeswoman at the National Institute for Nanotechnology in Edmonton. “You could say there’s a little bit of pixie dust floating about the place.”

But nanoscience isn’t magic. And scientists caution we can’t conjure up anything our hearts desire, because even at the nano scale we remain bound by nature’s rules.

“People have been misled into thinking that anything will be possible, and that’s just not true,” says Wolkow.

“We have new eyes and new hands and the ability to move things around at the finest scales. But I can’t just pick up an atom and put it where I want it to be. It will only relax spontaneously where it needs to be. It’s new engineering, but it’s not according to new rules.”

In his 2005 treatise on nanotechnology, The Dance of Molecules, University of Toronto chemist Ted Sargent says the goal of nanoscience is not to remove or replace the laws of nature, but to work within them, “to coax matter to assemble into new forms.”

He also says while scientists have become adept at understanding the structure of things, they still don’t clearly comprehend how a molecule’s particular shape, or its chemical bonds, give rise to its function.

“Today we can marvel at nature’s glorious creations,” he writes, “but when it comes to designing our own using nature’s Lego blocks, we are all thumbs.”

OPTIONAL CUT STARTS

Wolkow and Sargent are two of a growing cadre of Canadian chemists, physicists, engineers and medical researchers exploring new knowledge, and practical applications, in the uncharted realm of the atom.

Theirs has become one of the most competitive fields in science, where a cutthroat international race is underway to attract the best minds in the world.

So fierce is the competition for talent that in Edmonton last month, while officials at NINT were boasting about having lured to Canada Dr. Richard McCreery, a leading American chemist from Ohio State University, one of NINT’s established scientists was at the same time in recruitment talks with another institute south of the border.

Many researchers say Canada is still playing catchup with the U.S., Japan and Europe.

In 2001, the U.S. government established the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the largest nano-support program in the world. Each year it allocates more than $1 billion US towards nanoscience research, twice what the U.S. government spent on sequencing the human genome when that project was underway.

The NNI was a wakeup call for governments elsewhere, and spurred other countries into action. South Korea has since committed $2 billion to nanotechnology research until 2010. Taiwan has a six-year plan to spend $650 million. Japan’s nanotechnology budget was $875 million in 2004.

OPTIONAL CUT ENDS

Canadian governments spent roughly $180 million Cdn. on nanotechnology in 2004, the latest year for which figures are available — considered a decent investment for the size of Canada’s economy.

Still, Jean-Christophe Leroux, a nanoscientist and pharmacologist at the University of Montreal, says although he is well-funded compared to other Canadian researchers, it’s tough to hold his own internationally.

“My competitors in the U.S. have two to three times the funding I have,” he says.

What Canada has done well, say scientists, is build first-class nanoscience facilities. Where the country lags is delivering the long-term operating funds — to pay for technicians, scientists and ongoing research — to use the fancy equipment now in place.

“Canada has done a great job in the last few years establishing infrastructure,” says Peter Grutter, a McGill University physicist who advises the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) on nanotechnology issues.

“We’ve got state-of-the-art equipment. But to take advantage of all this equipment you need manpower, and that money has not kept up. There’s not enough money to take advantage of the potential of these facilities. I find that sad.”

Grutter also says Canadian industries, from pulp-and-paper to mining to aerospace, have done little so far to recognize the power of nanotechnology, and to step forward with research funding of their own.

“Canadian industry is not picking up the ball,” he says. “Why aren’t companies looking to the future?”

But Grutter and his colleagues say the biggest need in the country today is a national nanotechnology strategy — like the 2001 U.S. initiative — to co-ordinate a disparate array of federally-funded research, to bring scientists at Canada’s universities together, to help bring new discoveries to commercial use, and to figure out whether Canada needs new laws to regulate nanoproducts.

OPTIONAL CUT STARTS

Under the Paul Martin government, work was underway, led by a science advisor inside the Prime Minister’s Office, to develop a national nanotechnology strategy. Documents were ready to go before the federal cabinet. Then the government changed, and under the Harper regime the strategy has been left in limbo.

“I think we need a national strategy, if nothing else as a rallying point to say to scientists here and around the world: ‘Yes, Canada is thinking strategically in this area,'” says NINT director Nils Petersen, one of the government’s most senior nanotechnology bureaucrats.

“Canada is the only industrialized nation that does not have a national science and technology strategy, in anything,” adds Grutter. “You keep hearing talk from politicians that we’re going to be a knowledge-based economy. That’s nice and dandy, but lets see something concrete.

“As a country, we need to get our act together.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Chris Kahn
Sun

HUALAPAI INDIAN RESERVATION, Ariz. — Native leaders and a former astronaut stepped gingerly beyond the Grand Canyon’s rim Tuesday, staring through the glass floor and into the 1,219-metre chasm during the opening ceremony for a new observation deck.

A few members of the Hualapai Indian Tribe, which allowed the Grand Canyon Skywalk to be built, hopped up and down on the horseshoe-shaped structure. At its edge — 21 metres beyond the rim — the group peeked over the glass wall.

“I can hear the glass cracking!” Hualapai Chairman Charlie Vaughn said playfully.

The Hualapai, whose reservation is about 145 kilometres west of Grand Canyon National Park, allowed Las Vegas developer David Jin to build the $30 million US Skywalk in hopes of creating a unique attraction on their side of the canyon.

“To me, I believe this is going to help us. We don’t get any help from the outside, so, why not?” said Dallas Quasula, 74, a tribal elder who was at the Skywalk. “This is going to be our bread and butter.”

For $25 plus other fees, up to 120 people at a time will be able to look down to the canyon floor 1,219 metres below — a vantage point more than twice as high as the world’s tallest buildings.

The Skywalk is scheduled to open to the public March 28.

To reach the transparent deck, tourists must drive on twisty, unpaved roads through rugged terrain. But the tribe hopes it becomes the centrepiece of a budding tourism industry that includes helicopter tours, river rafting, a cowboy town and a museum of Indian replica homes.

Robert Bravo, operations manager of the Hualapai tourist attractions called Grand Canyon West, said he hopes the Skywalk will double tourist traffic to the reservation this year, from about 300,000 visitors to about 600,000. In later years, he hopes it brings in about one million tourists.

“It’s a great feeling today. Once everybody sees this, and it’s televised, they’re going to know to come here,” Bravo said.

Architect Mark Johnson said the Skywalk can support the weight of a few hundred people and will withstand wind up to 160 km/h. The observation deck has a 76-millimetre-thick glass bottom and has been equipped with shock absorbers to keep it from bouncing like a diving board as people walk on it.

The Skywalk has sparked debate on and off the reservation. Many Hualapai (pronounced WALL-uh-pie) worry about disturbing nearby burial sites, and environmentalists have accused the tribe of transforming the majestic canyon into a tourist trap.

Hualapai leaders say they weighed those concerns for years before agreeing to build the Skywalk. With a third of the tribe’s 2,200 members living in poverty, the tribal government decided it needs the tourism dollars.

Construction crews spent two years building the walkway. They drilled steel anchors 14 metres into the limestone rim to hold the deck in place. Earlier this month, they welded the Skywalk to the anchors after pushing it past the edge using four tractor trailers and an elaborate system of pulleys.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

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Randy Shore
Sun

Millennia-old native village sites in Stanley Park were still in use by first nations people in the 1880s when surveyors and road builders knocked the homes down to create the Park Drive perimeter road.

Road workers chopped away part of an occupied native house that was impeding the surveyors at the village of Chaythoos (pronounced “chay toos”), near Prospect Point. City of Vancouver historian J.S. Matthews interviewed August Jack Khatsahlano, who was a child in the house at the time.

“We was inside this house when the surveyors come along and they chop the corner of our house when we was eating inside,” Khatsahlano said in that 1934 conversation at city hall.

“We all get up and go outside see what was the matter. My sister Louise, she was only one talk a little English; she goes out ask Whiteman what’s he doing that for. The man say, ‘We’re surveying the road.’

“My sister ask him, “‘Whose road?'”

Most of the native inhabitants at Chaythoos left the park at that time and went to live on the reserve at Kitsilano Point, which was later transferred by the province to the federal government and eventually sold.

“When they left they took the above-ground grave of their chief with them when they left,” according to historian Jean Barman. The remains of Chief Supplejack, father of August Jack, had been kept in a cedar mausoleum at Chaythoos, the bones stored in canoe-shaped sarcophagus.

The last archeological survey of the park, completed in 1995 by Sheila Minni and Michael Forsman for the Ministry of Highways, found four new archeological sites. Their report also expanded the known boundaries of five of the seven previously known sites in the park.

Their survey was limited to the eastern half of the park and concentrated on areas affected by the expansion of the Stanley Park and Lions Gate causeway. The authors note that no complete survey of archeological and heritage resources in the park has ever been done.

Further investigation, they say, would likely reveal even more sites and contribute to the picture of native life and historic use of the park by native peoples.

Of one lost site, August Jack told Matthews of a burial ground not far from Xwayxway — now the site of Lumbermen’s Arch — that dates to “long before” his time. Its location remains unknown, though a letter to Matthews from local anthropologist Charles Hill-Tout notes that several skeletons were found during a road crew excavation of the shell midden at Xwayxway.

The largest settlement in the park in the 1880s, during August Jack’s time, was at Xwayxway, which was razed when the road went through.

The big house of that settlement was more than 60 metres long and about 20 metres wide, according to the interview with Khatsahlano. The building was constructed from large cedar posts and slabs. More than 100 people in 11 families lived there.

A potlatch was held at Xwayxway (pronounced “whoi whoi”) in 1875 in that longhouse, according to the commemorative integrity statement published when the park was declared a national historic site. The potlatch, held in the chief’s longhouse “Tay-Hay,” is also mentioned in the minutes of a city council meeting in which the medical health officer recommends destruction of the buildings at Xwayxway because of a smallpox outbreak, according to Eric McLay, president of the Archaeology Society of B.C.

Much of the native history of the park is shrouded in the mists of time. But Capt. George Vancouver encountered and wrote about people of the Squamish nation on those lands when he explored the area in 1792.

Spanish explorer Jose Maria Narvaez conducted a cursory exploration of the peninsula and the Burrard Inlet in 1791. But it was Vancouver who wrote about the area and its people at length in his journals.

Vancouver records it as an island, as the area from Coal Harbour west was submerged at high tide. He was met by 50 natives in canoes “who conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility,” he wrote in his journal.

The “Indians” presented Vancouver and his men “with several fish cooked, and undressed, of the sort already mentioned as resembling the smelt.”

He continued: “These good people, finding we were inclined to make some return for their hospitality, shewed much understanding in preferring iron to copper.”

Barman, an expert on the native history of the park, said the size and depth of the midden heaps found in the park suggests native settlement goes back much further than the good captain’s visit.

The midden at Xwayxway was so large that road crews who mined the site for calcined (fire-heated) shell used the distinctive white material to pave Park Drive “from Coal Harbour around Brockton Point and a long distance towards Prospect Point,” according to the notation on a City of Vancouver Archives photo of the crew excavating the midden heap.

Documents supporting the National Historic Site designation bestowed on the park by the federal government in 1988 note the existence of burial sites, middens and “long-abandoned villages” as well as acknowledging two “named” Squamish villages, Xwayxway and Chaythoos.

Minni and Forsman’s report includes five other native place names: Slhxi’7elsh (Siwash Rock), Ch’elxwa7elch (Lost Lagoon/Coal Harbour), Oxachu (Beaver Lake) and Papiyek (Brockton Point) and Skwtsa7s (possibly Deadman’s Island).

The documents suggest that the native settlements within the park boundaries are at least 3,000 years old.

“There’s evidence that [first nations people] were there for a very long time,” said Barman. “And this part of the history of Stanley Park has been acknowledged very little.”

“They talk about it as a sort of mythic past as opposed to saying that they were there when Europeans arrived and visibly living there until the 1920s,” said Barman, author of Stanley Park’s Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Ranch and Brockton Point.

Midden heaps are scattered throughout the park, some of them close to the major trails that criss-cross the park today, Barman said. Their existence suggests that other village sites are likely waiting to be found, she said.

“There’s more there than just the midden heaps,” Barman said.

The site of Chaythoos village is noted on a brass plaque placed on the low lands east of Prospect Point commemorating the centennial of the park in 1988.

The apocryphal story has Lord Stanley spreading his arms and dedicating the park “to the use and enjoyment of peoples of all colours, creeds, and customs, for all time.” In fact, he would not visit the park until the following year, as governor-general.

“They so much wanted to erase the fact of the aboriginal presence in the park that they held the park opening ceremonies on the site of Chaythoos after they chased out the people who lived there,” Barman said.

The restoration of the park’s storm-damaged areas is a perfect opportunity to do some archeological prospecting and get a better idea of the potential richness of these troves, Barman said.

Stanley Park restoration task group leader Jim Lowden said the archeological survey being used by the park board shows the general location of a handful of significant sites around the park. The report, Status of Archaeological Sites on Lands Administered by the City of Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, was prepared for the provincial government in 1978.

The text makes reference to shell middens, with no detail about the other possible contents of ancient settlement sites, Lowden said.

McLay said only a fraction of the park has been properly surveyed and suspects many hidden features may have been damaged by winter storms.

Minni and Forsman recorded 92 culturally modified trees (CMTs), mainly in the area east of Pipeline Road.

“There is a high potential that undiscovered CMTs and other smaller heritage sites may be located in these areas of wind damage — just because no one has looked, doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” McLay said.

The restoration of the park is a great opportunity to add to our knowledge of the first nations history of the area and to make those sites part of the public park experience for visitors, he said.

While the Squamish Nation has the most recent history in the park, the downtown peninsula and much of the area of Vancouver is subject to at least five competing land claims, including assertions of historical use by the Sto:Lo, Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh and the Hul Qumi Num treaty group.

The Lower Fraser River region and Puget Sound were the centre of a thriving Coast Salish culture prior to European settlement, according to Bruce Miller, an anthropology professor at the University of B.C.

Stanley Park is part of the core Coast Salish territory, which includes the east coast of Vancouver Island, the Fraser River to Yale and in Puget Sound. It was one of the largest, most densely populated nations in aboriginal North America and unique because it did not depend on agriculture.

“These are people who travel by canoe, they are water travellers and this territory is part of a complex of waterways connecting places,” Miller explained. The Coast Salish did not define ownership of places in the modern sense, although they have assimilated European notions of land ownership, which tends to muddy land claims.

“Any one longhouse group would have a winter house in one place and procurement stations in other areas,” he said. Settlements, areas of stewardship and foraging areas were controlled by family groups and access was regulated through a complex network of kinship associations often built through marriage between clans.

“If you didn’t have direct stewardship of a place and you didn’t have access through kinship you just weren’t going there,” Miller said. “The key word is protocol; you could get access to these places but you have to do the right things, talk to the right guy and ask permission in the right way.”

Over the centuries before European contact, many family groups could have made use of the sheltered sites and food-gathering areas in and around Stanley Park. Out-marrying was constantly expanding the kinship networks, Miller said.

Tsleil Waututh (Burrard Band) spokesman Leonard George said his people’s history in the Burrard Inlet is one of continuous occupation and use dating back thousands of years.

But political and kinship affiliations allowed people from other clans to use prime harvesting and fishing areas at different times of the year and many of those relationships are still in evidence today.

“Even in the last five generations, we have relationships through our grandmothers to the Squamish people,” George said.

“My first cousins now are Squamish,” he said.

The first nations understanding of ownership allowed those lands “to be shared in peace.”

“We spent as much time in Squamish or at Musqueam as they did here,” George explained. “That’s even during my lifetime. We would forage feast where the clam picking was good and conduct our ceremonies together.”

“We respect common areas like Stanley Park collectively,” George said.

George said his family traces the George surname to the arrival of Captain George Vancouver, one of the first Europeans who had significant contact with native people in Stanley Park and Burrard Inlet.

First nations people will be working with the park board on every aspect of the park’s storm damage cleanup, restoration and future development.

“We want to make sure that our middens and anthropological interests are cared for,” George said. “Then maybe build a longhouse village to commemorate all of our history there.”

If something good can be said to come of the massive damage that winds and snow storms wreaked on the park this winter, it is that first nations and park officials are finally talking in a constructive way about first nations history in Stanley Park, he said.

STANLEY PARK WAS AN ‘ISLAND’ WHEN VANCOUVER SAW IT

Capt. George Vancouver’s description of his first dealings with the aboriginal people living in today’s Stanley Park:

From Point Grey we proceeded first up the eastern branch of the sound, where, about a league within its entrance, we passed to the northward of an island [Stanley Park] which nearly terminated its extent, forming a passage from ten to seven fathoms deep, not more than a cable’s length in width. This island lying exactly across the channel, appeared to form a similar passage to the south of it, with a smaller island lying before it. From these islands, the channel, in width about half a mile, continued its direction about east. Here we were met by about fifty Indians, in their canoes, who conducted themselves with the greatest decorum and civility, presenting us with several fish cooked, and undressed, of the sort already mentioned as resembling the smelt. These good people, finding we were inclined to make some return for their hospitality, shewed much understanding in preferring iron to copper.

For the sake of the company of our new friends, we stood on under an easy sail, which encouraged them to attend us some little distance up the arm. The major part of the canoes twice paddled forward, assembled before us, and each time a conference was held. Our visit and appearance were most likely the objects of their consultation, as our motions on these occasions seemed to engage the whole of their attention. The subject matter, which remained a profound secret to us, did not appear of an unfriendly nature to us, as they soon returned, and, if possible, expressed additional cordiality and respect. This sort of conduct always creates a degree of suspicion, and should ever be regarded with a watchful eye. In our short intercourse with the people of this country, we have generally found these consultations take place, whether their numbers were great or small; and though I have ever considered it prudent to be cautiously attentive on such occasions, they ought by no means to be considered as indicating at all times a positive intention of concerting hostile measures; having witnessed many of these conferences, without our experiencing afterwards any alteration in their friendly disposition. This was now the case with our numerous attendants, who gradually dispersed as we advanced from the station where we had first met them, and three or four canoes only accompanied us up a navigation which, in some places, does not exceed an hundred and fifty yards in width.

We landed for the right about half a league from the head of the inlet, and about three leagues from its entrance. Our Indian visitors remained with us until by signs we gave them to understand we were going to rest, and after receiving some acceptable articles, they retired, and by means of the same language, promised an abundant supply of fish the next day; our seine having been tried in their presence with very little success. A great desire was manifested by these people to imitate our actions, especially in the firing of a musket, which one of them performed, though with much fear and trembling. They minutely attended to all our transactions, and examined the color of our skins with infinite curiosity. In other respects they differed little from the generality of the natives we had seen. They possessed no European commodities, or trinkets, excepting some rude ornaments apparently made from sheet copper; this circumstance, and the general tenor of their behavior, gave us reason to conclude that we were the first people from a civilized country they had yet seen. Nor did it appear that they were nearly connected, or had much intercourse with other Indians, who traded with the European or American adventurers.

Perfectly satisfied with our researches in this branch of the sound, at four in the morning of Thursday the 14th [Date: 1792-06-14], we retraced our passage in; leaving on the northern shore, a small opening extending to the northward.

As we passed the situation from whence the Indians had first visited us the preceding day, which is a small border of low marshy land on the northern shore, intersected by several creeks of fresh water, we were in expectation of their company, but were disappointed, owing to our travelling so soon in the morning. Most of their canoes were hauled up into the creeks, and two or three only of the natives were seen straggling about on the beach. None of their habitations could be discovered, whence we concluded that their village was within the forest. Two canoes came off as we passed the island, but our boats being under sail with a fresh favorable breeze, I was not inclined to halt, and they almost immediately returned.

The shores of this channel, which after Sir Harry Burrard of the navy, I have distinguished by the name of BURRARD’S CHANNEL.

— from the journal of George Vancouver titled “Quit Admiralty Inlet, and proceed to the Northward — Anchor in Birch Bay — Prosecute the Survey in the Boats — Meet two Spanish Vessels — Astronomical and Nautical Observations” dated June 13, 14, 1792.

 

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Algae have enormous appetite for carbon dioxide

Margaret Munro
Sun

Pond scum may not jump to most people’s minds as an environmental saviour, but some, including Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, say it could do wonders for the Canadian environment.

Lunn and other proponents estimate that tiny green microbes commonly associated with scummy lakes could capture as much as 100 million tonnes of CO2 now wafting out of coal-fired power plants and oilsands projects each year. That’s more than 10 per cent of all the CO2 pumped out of Canada’s smokestacks and exhaust pipes.

It is a mental — and arithmetical — leap to see algae as a serious weapon against climate change. But the head of the Canadian “microalgae” initiative announced by Lunn earlier this week says the organisms also have the potential to generate such valuable byproducts as methane gas, biofuel and animal feed.

“Algae are some of the fastest growing organisms out there,” says Brent Lakeman of the Alberta Research Council, who is managing the $400,000 project funded largely by the federal and provincial governments.

He says the idea is to divert the CO2 heading up smokestacks into ponds to boost the growth of algae that have an enormous appetite for the gas. Not only do they consume CO2 faster than plants like soybeans or corn, but they can be grown almost anywhere there is water.

Ponds could be built close to big CO2 emitters, such as Saskatchewan’s coal-fired power plants or Alberta’s oil upgraders, and designed to optimize algal growth, says Lakeman. “It’s not like a wild Alberta lake or something.”

The ponds would, however, use fast-growing algae native to the Prairies. Scientists are already searching for good candidates to put to work, says Lakeman.

Lunn cited the algae initiative as more evidence the Conservatives are “serious about delivering real results to Canadians and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Johanne Whitmore, a climate policy analyst at the Pembina Institute in Ottawa, sees it as evidence of the Conservative’s delaying tactics.

“It is fine to talk about new technology and invest in research and development,” says Whitmore. “But if they were serious about reducing emissions, they would do as much as they can now to start using technologies that reduce emission in the near-term and not just talk about the potential for reducing emissions.”

Lakeman agrees algae will not make a substantial dent in emissions anytime soon. But he and his colleagues see “potential for reducing CO2 emissions by 100 million tonnes per annum by 2012.”

Within six months, Lakeman says, he hopes to better understand the economic and environmental pros and cons of using microalgae to capture industrial carbon. If it looks promising, he says the plan is to move ahead quickly with demonstration and field projects.

Plenty of details need to be clarified, such as how much land would have to be covered with ponds to soak up 100 million tonnes of CO2 a year. It could be upwards of 2,000 square kilometres, judging by microalgae systems in other countries.

Lakeman says Canada’s long summer days are ideal for growing algae, and waste heat from industrial operations near the ponds could help prevent them from freezing in winter.

While biofuels and other salable products are a bonus, Lakeman says another advantage is that algae could recycle CO2 heading up the smokestack at any large facility.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

‘We may have reached that tipping point,’ says lead author of new research paper published in Science

Margaret Munro
Sun

The meltdown in the Arctic may have reached a tipping point that could trigger a cascade of climate changes and profoundly affect the weather in Earth’s temperate regions, a new study warns.

“When the ice thins to a vulnerable state, the bottom will drop out and we may quickly move into a new, seasonally ice-free state of the Arctic,” says Mark Serreze, a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and lead author of the study published in the journal Science today.

“I think there is some evidence that we may have reached that tipping point, and the impacts will not be confined to the Arctic region.”

The Science paper, Perspectives on the Arctic’s Shrinking Sea Ice Cover, pulls together recent research and observations and leaves little question the Arctic ice is shrinking. It says the trend in Arctic sea ice extent, which is defined as the total area where ice covers at least 15 per cent of the ocean surface, has been “negative” every month since satellite record keeping began in 1979.

The scientists attribute the ice loss to “strong natural variability” combined with rising concentrations of greenhouse gases that are being pumped into the atmosphere.

The extent of ice in September 2005 was the lowest on record in at least 50 years, and the scientists say “data for the past few years suggest an accelerating decline in winter sea-ice extent.”

“With this increasing vulnerability, a kick to the system just from natural climate fluctuations could send it into a tailspin,” Serreze says in a release issued with the study.

The impacts are already evident in the Arctic, where the increasing open water has accelerated coastal erosion and made the ice increasingly unpredictable for hunters.

But, this is just the start of what the scientists suggest will be far-reaching effects. One climate model suggests the loss of Arctic ice could reduce severity of Arctic cold fronts dropping into western North America and dump less snow and rainfall that agriculture and ski operators depend on.

Another model predicts storm tracks in the mid-latitudes could intensify, sending more precipitation into western and southern Europe.

The scientists also raise the spectre of Arctic ice melt contributing to disruption of the global thermohaline circulation, “possibly with far-reaching consequences.” The thermohaline currents snake around the world’s oceans carrying massive amounts of heat from the tropics north, warming the eastern U.S. and Europe.

“Just how things will pan out is unclear,” says Serreze, “but the bottom line is that Arctic sea ice matters globally.”

The paper says there are plenty of wild cards in the models and forecasts for the Arctic. But it concludes “given the growing agreement between models and observations, a transition to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean as the system warms seems increasingly certain.”

A chorus of scientists have been raising the alarm over the Arctic ice in recent years. Some now predict the Arctic could be ice-free in summer as early as 2030, with the polar ice cap vanishing for the first time in a million years. “It’s a remarkable change in a very short period of time,” David Barber, an ice specialist at the University of Manitoba, said in a recent interview.

Barber is co-leader of one of the more ambitious projects aiming to get a better read on what’s happening to the ice as part of the international polar year, which has just started. The Canadian coast guard icebreaker Amundsen will over-winter in the Beaufort Sea next year and serve as a floating lab and base camp for rotating teams of 200 scientists from 14 countries, as well as Inuit who are participating in the project.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007