Students at Imperial School are following the white rabbit down the rabbit hole this week.

The complete student body from grades one to 12 is immersing themselves in a Missoula Theatre Company musical adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland”. The kids are going to be studying under the direction of two trained actors/directors with the Montana-based touring company this week culminating in a dessert theatre performance of the musical at 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. this Saturday at the Imperial Community Hall.

Carol Baade, a drama teacher at Imperial School, said this is the first time in the 17 years she has been involved with the annual school musical that they have brought in a touring company to help students put on the show. She said it should be a “great experience” for the students, as they’ll be able to find out everything that goes into putting on a professional production.

“It’s a really neat opportunity for the students because these are all professionals and they come and do workshops during the classes for the students and help put on the show and also involve the younger students,” said Baade, noting past musicals usually involved only the high school students. “We’ve had very successful dessert theatres in the past…but we thought we’d try something different to give our students a new opportunity.”

Ethan Park and Shelby Mariah Art, the two members of the Missoula Children’s Theatre Company that are spending the week in Imperial to help the students put on “Alice in Wonderland”, begin the production by holding auditions for the musical today at the Imperial Community Centre. The 50 to 60 students picked begin rehearsals later this evening and continue to practise for four-and-a-half hours each day before the performance on Saturday.

The students that are not cast in a role would be involved as assistants to the directors or help with stage crew work, lighting, sound or preparation and serving “Queen of Hearts Cherry Tarts” desserts. The Imperial School senior band is also performing at the show and Jeanne Knoblauch has been retained to accompany the musical on piano.

To read more please see the March 10 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Telemarketers with a too good to be true sales pitch designed to empty a person’s wallet for something that is not too good at all have found a new way to get people to fall for their tricks.

Daniel Williams, senior call-taker supervisor at the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, said vacation call centres in Florida have started using a new form of “Caller ID Spoofing” where the first six digits of a person’s phone number followed by four random numbers appear on the phone. He said this tricks people into believing they are receiving a local call offering them a once in a lifetime travel package to an exotic location for a small credit card payment, which makes the actual “lousy deal” easier to believe.

“A lot of consumers now are very hesitant about picking up any blocked or foreign looking numbers, (but) this call has nothing to do with the number that is showing up,” said Williams. “Sometimes the call display shows the name of the person who the phone belongs to and sometimes it doesn’t. The legitimate holder of that number, they’re not (the one) dialing. It’s simply a call display trick.

“Then there are different pitches that they’re using at the start and it’s usually automated and the most common one is, ‘you’ve won 260,000 Air Miles, if you wish to claim press one,’ and when you press one you get patched through to the vacation call centre in Florida.”

Williams said selling lousy vacation packages is not illegal and has been around for a while and will continue to be as long as people are willing to buy them. He said the deception is the way the telemarketers are getting their foot in the door.

“In the last year more and more of what we’re seeing is they’ve gone to this first six digits of your phone number and then a random last four,” he said, noting Caller ID Spoofing has actually been around since 2004 and used to just be a series of random numbers. “It’s very common now. Where it is really worth our while to document the information is the consumer who has bought the vacation package on their credit card and then feels they’ve been cheated because they went into this because of the connection with Air Miles.”

Terry Oxman, a resident of Davidson, said he received a call with the number 306-567-1731 Feb. 18 at around 2 p.m. stating that he had won a vacation or prize. He said initially he thought it was a “Davidson local thing” and only hung up on the person because it was a bad connection.

Oxman said he called the number right back and received a message from SaskTel saying this number is out of service. It was only then that he realized it was a scam.

“This is the first time I recall it being a local call,” he said. “I would hate to hear someone got stung by this thinking it was a Davidson number.”

To read more please see the March 3 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

An early morning crime spree that targeted unlocked vehicles has local RCMP once again reminding rural residents to lock up their stuff.
Const. Kam Hay of the Craik RCMP detachment said sometime during the early morning hours of Friday, Feb. 21 three vehicles were stolen from Davidson and numerous others were entered and had their contents searched.
It was easy pickings for the thieves. All three of the stolen vehicles had their keys left in the ignitions. The vehicles have all been recovered.
Davidson seemed to be at the tail end of this latest crime spree. RCMP have received reports of similar incidents occurring around the same time in Hanley, Kenaston and Bladworth.
Donna Bessey said someone went through the vehicles parked outside her home in Bladworth. Nothing was taken. The thieves also went into the Bessey’s garage, but she said they couldn’t tell if anything was missing.
She said the suspects tried to steal a couple of trucks from Bladworth, but there was so much snow, they couldn’t get the vehicles unstuck.
Const. Hay said people might help prevent these crimes by not leaving wallets, purses, electronic equipment and other valuables in vehicles. People should also not leave keys in parked cars and trucks.
“As long as it is easy, they will keep coming back,” Hay said.
If anyone has information about these crimes, they are asked to contact Craik RCMP or to call Saskatchewan Crime Stoppers.

Thursday, Loraas Recycle made the rounds in Dundurn, rolling out their blue recycling carts.
The town became the latest of area municipalities making the move to curbside recycling collection. The residential recycling program will replace all the big, blue metal bins that comprise the Community Recycling Centre beside Dundurn’s fire hall.
Dundurn Mayor Doug Narraway said his wife notified him immediately Thursday morning when their blue bin arrived in their Dundurn yard. “She just texted me. She’s pretty excited,” he said.
Narraway said he’s heard “only a couple of grumblings” about the move to curbside recycling; instead, “a lot of people are excited” about the switch.
Each residence in Dundurn that has black garbage bin service received a rollout blue cart for their recyclable materials. The blue carts will be picked up biweekly, alternating with the black waste bin collection.
Loraas Recycle uses a single-stream recycling program. People are not required to sort their recyclable materials. Everything is placed in the bin altogether, allowing people to divert more than 50 per cent of their household waste from the landfill.
Narraway’s convinced that once people experience the convenience of no longer having to stockpile their recyclables and then haul the stuff downtown to the metal bins, residents will embrace the change.
“The people I’ve talked to have been really positive about it,” Narraway said, adding that once people realize how much material they can recycle instead of throwing it into the garbage, they’ll be impressed.
The town and the R.M. of Dundurn shared the costs of the Community Recycling Centre, which has been in place for nearly a decade. While it offered residents a place to take their recyclables, Narraway said often times because people from the R.M., Thode, Shields and the town were using the bins, “sometimes they would be so full our people in town couldn’t use them.”
To read more please see the March 3 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

There are several different issues with the delays in grain movement, which is a month to two months behind schedule in this area for getting older contracts cleaned up, but one local farmer doesn’t believe a resolution is coming anytime soon.

“We’re cleaning up our January canola contracts getting to the end of February right now,” said Davidson farmer Rob Stone, noting the delay is also stopping farmers from doing any new contracts for the next few months. “We could have probably had that cleaned up sooner, but the weather didn’t work for us and we weren’t concerned (about) moving at that point. There were a lot of people who jumped in line to make sure they were delivered too, so from our experience it’s not horrible. It was worse and it can get worse again if the railways don’t deliver. They missed two trains in a row at Richardson, so two weeks in a row that there was no cars and (if) you start having that happen on a consistent basis it really affects their capability to do any business.”

Stone said little accountability for the railroads to move the grain volume and honour their service agreements is still only one of the issues with the backlog of grain movement. He said the main problem is the grain companies not pushing hard enough in a public forum for improved service, which would include more railway employees and more engines dropping off cars and picking them up.

“There really hasn’t been a lot of pressure from the grain companies to this point,” he said. “It’s a tough one for sure, but the biggest issue is everyone has got a different reason why the railroads aren’t doing their job or performing to our expectations and the old excuse of it’s winter, it’s cold, that sort of stuff, (well) it’s cold and winter every year. We need to find better solutions (instead of) making excuses.”

Greg Brkich, MLA for Arm River–Watrous and a Bladworth farmer, said the system is backed up about two months due to several factors including the large crop grown last year, bad weather conditions and a couple November derailments. He said the province is trying to find a solution to this through meeting with both CN (Canadian National Railway) and CP (Canadian Pacific Railway) and grain companies to come up with a quicker method of getting grain moved.

“The short-term (solution) is for the railroad companies to put more crews on and put more trains out there,” said Brkich. “Long term is we have to sit down with the (grain) companies and the railroads to develop a long-range plan to handle this kind of volume.

“You go back 10 years (and) we’ve grown bigger crops (almost every year). With the improved farming techniques that are out there we expect this to be the norm, so the problem has to be looked (at) into the future. This isn’t a one-time problem.”

Brkich said there are penalties in the Federal Fair Rail Freight Service Act that grain companies can pursue to make sure the railroads perform up to expectations, but the companies haven’t been using them. He said that is something the province is asking the companies to use to solve the backlog problem because it is only the grain companies that can bring action forward.

To read more please see the February 24 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

The Fitness Centre at the Davidson Communiplex is in the process of pumping up its offerings to members while also working out some strains along the way.

Trevor Ouellette, recreation director for Davidson, said two new LifeSpan TR5000 treadmills and one Spirit Fitness elliptical trainer were installed at the Fitness Centre last Tuesday. He said the town has also ordered matting to finish rubberizing the whole floor at the gym.

“This gives us decent quality equipment that our members can use,” said Ouellette, noting memberships had been in decline for a while, but are now staring to come back up and currently stand at 18. “It’s just (getting) things in order to get our membership up and provide a quality workout area.”

Ouellette said the new heavy-duty equipment cost the town $9,000 to install, while the new matting came with a price tag of $1,700. He said the snag with putting in the upgraded equipment is they are drawing too much power, so some additional electrical work has to be done.

“The (charge) draws too much because the plug-ins along the one wall are all off one breaker, so when you plug more than one in it blows the breaker,” he said, noting this should cost an additional $600 to $1,000 to fix. Ouellette said these expenses are going to be coming out of the 2014 budget.

Blair Frederickson, a Fitness Centre member since last November, said the Davidson gym is a great way for him to get a good workout and especially so because of its location near Davidson School where he works as a career guidance councillor. He said the free weights and benches are the main things he takes advantage of, but does appreciate the variety of equipment available.

“It’s nice to have a gym in town where instead of me having to put out the expense of having to buy all the equipment and put in my own basement and then have my wife going ‘well you smell really bad’ to come to the gym here and work out,” said Frederickson. “The new treadmills are nice. I’m an outside runner, but in winter (and) especially when it’s really cold that’s something I’ll take advantage of and use.”

Ouellette said the other project in the works for the gym is fixing their front door where cold and ice has lifted a pad up and the kick plates and jams are getting off-kilter. He said it takes a bit of “finessing” to open and close the doors now, but once that is fixed the gym upgrades should be completed.

“We may get a vast number of (new) memberships and have to increase our equipment,” he said, “but right at this time there is nothing in the works other than what has already been planned.”