‘We love it’: Meet the man behind one of the most dazzling Christmas light displays in B.C.

BY SEAN BOYNTON GLOBAL NEWS

Posted December 25, 2019 4:51 pm

 The dazzling light display seen at 3313 Rae Street in Port Coquitlam on Dec. 24, 2019. Global News

If you visit Rae Street in Port Coquitlam around Christmas, you may want to bring sunglasses — even at night.

The street is home to one of the most dazzling light displays in the Lower Mainland, where thousands of strings, ornaments and rooftop installations intermingle with a fully lit-up Christmas tree that stands taller than the house.

The property is so extensively decorated that it’s separated into sections, each one with its own theme, from Star Wars to Disney to a working fire pit.

Homeowner Dale Brindley says the project started 10 years ago when he and his family moved into the home.

After he got his neighbours and family involved, he says the house has shone brighter and brighter every Christmas.

“We just started adding lights year after year, and got to the point where we all started doing it every year and it got bigger and bigger,” he said.

“I never thought it would be this big. It’s a big project and we love it.”

Brindley says he and four others start shopping for new additions throughout October. The actual installation takes about six weeks during weeknights and weekends.

“It pretty much takes every weekend through November, a couple weeks in October,” he said. “We have to bring stuff out of storage, too. That’s a whole weekend right there.

“About a two-month process.”

Brindley estimates anywhere between 175,000 to 200,000 individual lights end up adorning his home for the holiday season, based on a rough count two years ago.

The lights are all LED, he adds, which makes the power draw the equivalent of cooking a turkey every night.

“Otherwise I would not have done this,” he said.

Brindley adds it took a few years for the rest of the neighbours to get on board, but that they’ve since come around.

“At first they were worried I was a ‘Griswald neighbour,'” he said, referring to Chevy Chase’s holiday-loving dad in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

“Now everyone’s on board and helping each other out. They bring their families now too, so it’s almost like a block party.”

While the display attracts hundreds of visitors every year, Brindley doesn’t let the attention go to waste, collecting food and cash donations for the Shared Food Bank.

“It’s going very well, people have really been stepping it up,” he said.

While the display has already gotten massive, Brindley says he’s not stopping his plans for expansion next year.

“We’ve got a couple ideas,” he said.

“We’ll be doing this for a while, until the wife says she’s had enough.”

Sixty-nine Canadians giving up holidays to help with Australian wildfires

The Canadian PressStaff Contact

Published Sunday, December 22, 2019 5:01PM EST

In this Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019, photo, NSW Rural Fire Service crew fight the Gospers Mountain Fire as it impacts a property at Bilpin, New South Wales state, Australia. (Dan Himbrechts/AAP Images via AP)

TORONTO -- Sixty-nine Canadians are giving up their holidays at home to join the battle for the first time against the deadly wildfires devastating vast tracts of several Australian states.

The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre says a contingent of 21 highly trained staff from a variety of agencies left Canada on Dec. 3, for a 38 day deployment in New South Wales after the centre received an official request for assistance.

On Dec. 19 a second group of 30 Canadians was sent in for a 38 day deployment in the fire zone, and @a further 18 are leaving on Dec. 30 for about a month.

Kim Connors, the executive director of the Winnipeg based CIFFC, says that Canada has called on Australian firefighters four times since 2015, and the "agreements are reciprocal in nature so it was the first time that Australia has needed help from Canada."

"Our Canadian firefighters and their families have volunteered their time to be away for the holidays, which is different for the northern hemisphere to be dealing with wildland fires over Christmas and New Year's so we're very proud of them for doing that," he said in an interview.

The CIFFC says crews from Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, Yukon, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. are assisting with a variety of tasks including roles in command, aviation, planning, logistics and operations.

"So they're not on the front line, they're in the overall management of the fires," said Connors.

"They've been in a period of drought for quite a long period and it's not a very good situation down there and obviously their summer is just started as our winter starts."

Record high temperatures and strong southerly winds are fanning more than 100 fires in New South Wales alone.

Two volunteer firefighters have been killed and dozens of homes have been lost since Thursday in the massive fires, including the Gospers Mountain blaze, which covered more than 460,000 hectares.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 22, 2019

Woman out $1,000 after buying fake gold in Toronto parking lot

Pat ForanConsumer Alert Videojournalist, CTV News Toronto

@PatForanCTVNews Contact

Published Wednesday, December 18, 2019 7:30PM ESTLast Updated Thursday, December 19, 2019 8:48AM EST

TORONTO -- A Toronto woman says she feels shaken after learning that the hundreds of dollars’ worth of gold jewelery she bought from a person at a parking lot turned out to be fake.

Josephine Brilliantes said the scam occurred after she was approached by a woman at a parking lot near a grocery store in the Dufferin Street and Eglinton Avenue West area on Dec. 9.

The woman, she said, told her that she was in desperate need of money and was trying to sell gold jewelery from her family business.

The woman claimed she was out of gas and still had a long way to travel, Brilliantes said.

“I was even telling my husband ‘let’s just give her money for gas.’ My intention was to help her needs,” Brilliantes told CTV News Toronto.

She said the woman pulled out her jewelry and said her family business made rings and necklaces out of gold. The woman showed her photos of the jewelry being made, she said.

“When I saw the 18-karat symbol on a ring I thought it was real gold,” Brilliantes said.

She said the woman told her that she would be doing a huge favour if she bought all the jewelry to help her finance her trip.

“She said she really needed the cash and she would give me all the jewelry she had for $1,000," she said.

Brilliantes said she then went to a bank machine took out $1,000 cash and paid for the jewelry.

The woman, she said, hugged and kissed her and then fled the area.

Brilliantes said she learned from a jeweller at a store that what she bought was not gold.

“The lady told me it's not gold, it’s brass,” Brilliantes said. “She said that every week people are coming in to her store to show they also bought that kind of jewelry.”

Brilliantes said she reported the scam to police, but is still short $1,000 just before Christmas.

She said that despite feeling embarrassed about the story, she wanted to share what happened to her so that it doesn't happen to someone else.

“It's a lesson, never trust,” she said.

She said she is not sure what she'll do with all the brass jewelery, but still hopes to enjoy the holiday season despite the scam.

Car2Go to end service in North America in February 2020

The car-share service, which operates in Vancouver and Montreal, will cease operations on Feb. 29, 2020

CBC News · Posted: Dec 18, 2019 11:14 AM PT | Last Updated: 7 minutes ago

Car2Go currently operates in several North American cities, including Vancouver and Montreal. (Maggie MacPherson/CBC)

The car-share service Car2Go will shut down operations in North America early next year, including in Vancouver and Montreal. 

The German company, which recently merged with the car-share service DriveNow under the name Share Now, announced Wednesday that its last day of service will be Feb. 29, 2020.

As well as members in Vancouver and Montreal, the closure will affect riders in Chicago, New York City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

"The decision to close North America was made based on two extremely complicated realities," the company said in a statement.

"The first being the volatile state of the global mobility landscape, and the second being the rising infrastructure complexities facing North American transportation today, such as a rapidly evolving competitive mobility landscape, the lack of necessary infrastructure to support new technology (including electric vehicle car share) and rising operating costs."

• Car2Go to pull out of Calgary and 4 U.S. cities before year's end

The company says it will also stop operating in London, Brussels and Florence due to low usage in those cities. The company will continue to operate in 18 cities in Europe.

Car2Go shut down in Toronto in May 2018, blaming new city rules that rendered its service "inoperable."

LifeLabs reveals data breach, possibly affecting up to 15 million Canadians

BY MAHAM ABEDI GLOBAL NEWS

Posted December 17, 2019 11:52 am Updated December 17, 2019 5:08 pm

WATCH: LifeLabs says it paid ransom to secure data stolen in a breach

Lab-test provider LifeLabs says the personal information — possibly including health card numbers — of an unknown number of the company’s 15 million Canadian customers was stolen in a data breach in late October.

The test results from 85,000 Ontarians were also stolen. The company says it took measures to secure the data, including “retrieving the data by making a payment.”

The compromised test results were from 2016 and earlier, and LifeLabs said it will contact affected customers directly. There is no evidence that results were accessed in provinces other than Ontario.

LifeLabs is Canada’s largest provider of lab tests for diagnostic purposes. The majority of its operations are in Ontario and B.C., where it is headquartered.

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia are now investigating the cyberattack on the computer system. The breach was reported to the offices on Nov. 1.

“An attack of this scale is extremely troubling. I know it will be very distressing to those who may have been affected. This should serve as a reminder to all institutions, large and small, to be vigilant,” Brian Beamish, Ontario’s privacy commissioner, said in a press release Tuesday.

In a letter to customers, president and CEO Charles Brown apologized for the security breach.

“I want to emphasize that at this time, our cyber security firms have advised that the risk to our customers in connection with this cyber-attack is low and that they have not seen any public disclosure of customer data as part of their investigations, including monitoring of the dark web and other online locations,” he said.

Brown added that system issues related to the breach have been fixed, and Tuesday’s announcement is “in the interest of transparency.”

He also said a customer who is concerned about the safety of their data will be able to receive “one free year of protection that includes dark web monitoring and identity theft insurance” at the LifeLabs website.

The incident is only the latest data breach to affect Canadian consumers.

The Desjardins Group revealed in December that a data breach in June hit 4.2 million members, all of its clients.

The Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce both suffered data breaches last May. Equifax announced in 2017 that a massive data breach compromised the personal information and credit card details of 143 million Americans and 100,000 Canadians.

In August, some 20,000 Air Canada customers learned their personal data may have been compromised following a breach in the airline’s mobile app.

In the past three years, millions of consumers have been affected by hacks against a panoply of companies including British Airways, Uber, Deloitte, Ashley Madison and Walmart.

Surrey to get a second hospital as health-care needs boom

Premier John Horgan and Health Minister Adrian Dix made the announcement near the location of the new hospital in the community of Cloverdale.

THE CANADIAN PRESS

Updated: December 9, 2019

Click here to watch: https://vancouversun.com/health/local-health/surrey-to-get-a-second-hospital-as-health-care-needs-boom

The fast-growing city of Surrey is getting a second hospital.

Premier John Horgan and Health Minister Adrian Dix made the announcement near the location of the new hospital in the community of Cloverdale.

Dix says the hospital is a key commitment to help meet the health care needs of Surrey’s rapidly growing community.

The government says the hospital will have inpatient beds, an emergency department, operating rooms, outpatient services, and lab and diagnostic services.

It says the business plan phase of the project will now get underway to finalize details of the project’s scope and budget.

Surrey is the second-largest city in B.C. and is on track to overtake Vancouver as the most populous city by 2041.