After more than seven months of pushing for the province to share more information with a coalition of First Nations, an agreement on disclosing COVID-19 case numbers has been reached.

Port Alberni city council will go into an in-camera meeting to decide the next steps for addressing a property owner not complying with Remedial Action Orders to remove all recreational vehicles from his Fourth Avenue property.

Randy Brown, who owns the Wintergreen Apartments on Fourth Avenue, has moved about nine RVs onto his property over the winter to house the homeless.

Driving by Port Alberni’s Wintergreen Apartments on Fourth Avenue on any given day, you’ll most likely catch a glimpse of people coming and going from the two-storey building, stashing their shopping carts by the edge of the fence or dashing back and forth from the Overdose Prevention Site just up the road.

It has been more than a year since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in British Columbia. It started with a man living in the Vancouver Coastal Health Region who had just returned from Wuhan, China.

The man has since recovered but in the following months more than 69,716 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed in British Columbia.

As of Feb. 5, 2021, a total of 1,246 British Columbians have died of COVID-19; at least three of those deaths were Nuu-chah-nulth people.

Members of the Alberni Valley’s Grassroots Homelessness Coalition (GHC), now a registered society, are getting closer to providing a more permanent mobile warming centre for those experiencing homelessness.

Lax regulations compared to neighbouring U.S. states have made Canada’s West Coast a convenient dumping ground for cruise ship pollution, environmentalists believe.

While the cruise ship industry disputes the claim and defends its standards, Stand.earth and West Coast Environmental Law (WCEL) are pressing the federal government to step up with marine discharge regulations comparable to those in California, Washington and Alaska.

A follow up report on discrimination in B.C.’s health care system is stressing the need to improve access to primary treatment, as too many Indigenous people are forced to seek help in the emergency department due to little access to a family doctor.

A call for urgent reforms in logging practices to protect B.C. communities from climate change impacts reflects what First Nations have known all along, says NTC President Judith Sayers.

“There is so much at stake,” Sayers said after speaking out on the issue, publicly backing a Sierra Club report released Feb. 1. “I’m hoping people wake up. The forest fires two summers ago in British Columbia were just devastating.”

In a growing effort to revitalize Indigenous languages, Hesquiaht First Nation is encouraging their youth to apply to a free filmmaking program fused with language learning.

Collaborating with Reel Youth, a non-profit organization that delivers community development programming to youth across Canada, each participant will be paired with a fluent speaking elder to collaborate on a video with. 

Together, they will create a storyline that reveals the elder’s personality while incorporating Hesquiaht language throughout at least 50 per cent of the video. 

A new book showcasing the historical views and development of canoes as well as contemporary stories featuring canoes has been published. Alan L. Hoover, a retired curator and manager at the Royal British Columbia Museum co-authored Northwest Coast Canoes of Indigenous North America, which was released in December 2020.

Hoover collaborated on the book with retired researcher and author Eugene Arima, who wrote A Report on A West Coast Whaling Canoe Reconstructed at Port Renfrew, B.C. (1975) and The Whaling People of Vancouver Island and Cape Flattery (2011)