Rumours and things

It was a great year if you don’t count the playoffs for the Vancouver Canucks. They had 318 sellouts in a row and the fans are busy buying their season tickets for next season. There are seventeen thousand seats for season ticket holders and 96 per cent of them have been resold. Another money winning season for the team. It will be interesting to see what changes will be made by management.

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Tim Hortons has a problem that needs solving quickly and it concerns their baking operations. It is at the top of the list because the Canadian fast food giant has a system of “par bake” for making its doughnuts, Timbits, pastries and breads. It was in 2003 that the chain stopped baking the products from scratch. It now “par bakes” them in a factory in Brantford, Ont., flash freezes them and ships them to their 3,600 stores across the country. The company's Swiss-owned baking partner wants out of the contract and that seems strange because the contract to supply must have been a good one. Now Tim's can sell out their fifty per cent share or buy the entire operation.
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Still our most popular question from readers: when will Ikea build a store in the Okanagan? We know the answer to that, probably never. We just don’t have enough people to support such an operation. In the meantime Ikea is looking to the future with a new monster store for Richmond. The new store is to be built and the current one there to be torn down after. This store will equal the 350,000 sq ft store in Coquitlam.

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Mobilicity is the new name to add to the list of future suppliers of cell phone service to be added to the Canadian market. The start is in Toronto and then west to Calgary and Vancouver. They are joining Wind and Public Mobile and there will be no contracts on subsidies on handsets.

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If you’re from Calgary you probably drove by at one time or another the grand old Hart mansion. For the second time in four years, the 5,600-square-foot, three-story mansion in Patterson Heights that once housed the wrestling Hart family is for sale. It has been listed for sale in Calgary for nearly $5 million.

The 105-year-old house is filled with odd nooks and crannies, including the famous basement dungeon where Stu Hart, the man who started Stampede Wrestling, and his sons practiced their world famous wrestling moves.

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As we have reported many times in the past, Prince George goes after the big one as the community wants to become a global freight hub. The airport is after international status as a freight hub. It has the capacity and North America’s third longest commercial runway. Their plans center on Anchorage International Airport where they counted 46,965 cargo aircraft landings. Is some of that business available?

Prince George also wants to build a connection between the Port of Prince Rupert and themselves to handle ocean, rail and road cargo.

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Just so there is no confusion on the winding down of the Conservatory project in Glenmore all of the investors who laid their money on the table to buy one of those condos has been repaid in full. None of their money was lost. It was held in trust by Coldwell Banker and has been distributed. I heard from a couple of the buyers and they are satisfied but unhappy they won’t be able to retire there as they had planned.

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Five years ago I wanted to write about a new car dealer that was coming to the Valley from Saskatoon. I couldn’t get enough information here so I started talking to people in Saskatoon who helped me get a handle on this interesting story in the automotive business in Western Canada.

The Vaughn Wyant Automotive group began with their first store in 1983 when he purchased Jubilee Ford in Saskatoon. He added the Jaguar franchise in 1994, Volvo in 1996 and Volvo in 2002. Then came Mitsubishi, Audi and Mercedes. It wasn’t that long ago that I read a story on Saskatoon's future and Vaughn Wyant was talking about opening a Porsche full service dealership for the expensive vehicle.

The company moved west first in 1995 buying the Golden Ears Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge dealership in Maple Ridge. Then came the Kelowna Volvo and Kelowna Hyundai in 2005 and adding to the store count with the Vernon Hyundai and Hilltop Subaru in 2008. The new Hyundai facility on the highway is quite spectacular.

The company also owns the Ford dealership in Prince Albert. That is quite a lineup of car stores.