The family of a missing Breton man who disappeared seven years ago are still hoping for help from the public.
Andrew George Nicoll was last heard from on April 21, 2014. His daughter, Bronwyn Taylor, had just been to visit him for Easter the day before.
Taylor says she and her father were very close and had been texting throughout the day. The last text she received from him was at 3:15 p.m. At that time Nicoll was outside working on his deck. At 4 p.m. Taylor sent him another text, but this one was never read.
When the text message went unanswered, Taylor wasn’t initially concerned. Her father lived on a large piece of land near Breton. The area was isolated and the cell service wasn’t always great, so she assumed it just hadn’t gone through.
It was when she received the call that he hadn’t shown up for work the next morning that she knew something was wrong.
As a former member of the Royal Navy, police officer and volunteer firefighter, Taylor knew that her father would not be irresponsible about his work shift. His employer, who also recognized that this was abnormal behaviour, had gone out to his home to check on him, but he wasn’t there.
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Taylor called the RCMP immediately and travelled out to his house. She says she can remember some people suggesting he just took off or perhaps killed himself – his wife had died of cancer two years prior – but what Taylor saw told her this wasn’t the case.
Taylor had just been to visit him the day before he disappeared. “He was in really good spirits. No indication of [him] being suicidal. He was not, whatsoever,” she said.
Nicoll had been working on his deck, getting his place ready to be sold. All of his tools were left out and he’d been in the middle of adding oil to his chainsaw.
He’d also put both dogs inside the house, something he only did when there were visitors coming up the driveway. Inside they could see that he’d gone grocery shopping that day, there was chicken thawing for supper in the microwave, and the dog dishes were filled with food and sitting on the countertop.
“The only reason the dogs would ever be locked inside the house would be if someone was coming down the driveway or he was using his chainsaw,” she said.
After a quick search, they also found his keys, wallet and jacket. His vehicle was still in the driveway.
There was no indication that Nicoll had plans to go anywhere at that time. “We were texting for most of the day,” said Taylor.
Seven years later, Taylor says she’s still hoping for answers. “To this date, we still have no idea what happened to my dad,” she said.
Taylor said her first thought when she arrived was that there had been a medical situation. She said there were several areas on his property that he liked to visit and they immediately checked all of those areas.
RCMP searched the property for more than a day. When they didn’t find him, Taylor used her connections as a volunteer firefighter and a peace officer for nine years, to ask for volunteers to complete a detailed search of the property.
“We did an extensive five-month search,” she said.
Unfortunately, nothing was found.
At one point they brought dogs out to the property, and the dogs indicated that there was something at one point in a creek that runs through his property. Because of the level of silt in that area, rescue workers were unable to use ground-penetrating radar technology to check for anything under the creek bed. And despite numerous efforts, they were never able to find what it was the dogs had located.
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
“I strongly believe that if it had been a suicide or a medical event, we would have found the body on that very first day,” said Taylor.
Since there were no leads, the case eventually went cold. But Taylor never gave up hope. Every year she would post information to social media in the hopes of jogging someone’s memory.
This year she received a call from the Alberta RCMP Missing Persons Unit. They indicated that they were taking a look at the file and hoping to find something that might have been missed. However, since that time the home and land have been purchased by different owners and the situation might be more complicated.
“He was just such an amazing dad,” said Taylor. She says Nicoll originally met her mother in Prince Rupert, B.C. when she was a nurse. The two ended up getting married and living in England for the first eight years of Taylor’s life.
“They were soulmates,” says Taylor.
During that time her father was a police officer.
When they relocated to this country, Taylor says her dad was very proud to call Canada his home. Taylor was an only child, and because there was no family nearby, the three of them were very close.
“He was really just proud to be in Canada. He was so excited to be in Canada and have the opportunity here,” she said.
The family resided in the Edmonton area and Nicoll went into security, originally starting at the Royal Alexandra Hospital. It was there that he made many friends that would soon become his extended family.
“I’m still in contact with all of his friends that he made throughout his career. They’ve become like family to me,” said Taylor. “He just made an impact on everyone he met.”
Marvin Chick was one of the close friends that Nicoll made while working at the Royal Alex. He said he also worked with Nicoll when he started working with Transit, where Nicoll was a peace officer.
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
“He loved his family and he loved Canada,” he said. Chick said that when the couple moved to the acreage, Nicoll took on his wife’s love of animals and they had quite the menagerie. He said any animal that needed a home found one with the Nicolls.
“He was a friendly guy. He would do anything for anybody,” said Chick. He said that if Nicoll came across someone who was down and out, which he did often in his job, he would go out of his way to buy them lunch or help them out when he could.
Chick said when he first learned that Nicoll was missing he was confused and worried. “He wasn’t a person who would harm himself on purpose,” said Chick. He said that Nicoll loved his daughter too much.
Chick said he helped out with the search. And now he’s just left with questions. He says he has suspicions about what happened, but he doesn’t have any confirmation. “It is a big mystery for me,” he said.
He said that Nicoll had a big heart. He remembers one afternoon when they were going for a walk on Nicoll’s property they came across a porcupine that was drowning in the creek. Nicoll waded out there and rescued the animal, laying it out in the sun so it could warm up. “He went back and checked and it had recovered and gone on its way,” he said.
Tana Vea was another of Nicoll’s close friends, having met him at the Royal Alex. Vea had moved to Edmonton from Hawaii, and since there was little family in the area, they became each other’s family.
Vea said that Nicoll was a stickler for grammar on all of their reports. He said he would bring out his red pen and mark everything up. Vea says there is a man who now works for the Edmonton Police Service who credits Nicoll for his skill in filling out reports. “He said Andy’s teachings with report writing helped him to get the position he has today.”
Vea said he also worked with Nicoll at Transit, where he was Peace Officer. He said Nicoll had eventually gotten promoted through the ranks until he became an investigator, mostly working on internal complaints.
Vea says one thing that makes him sad is that Taylor’s daughter is the same age as his grandson, and he knows that Nicoll and his wife would have loved being grandparents. He said he thinks it’s also hard on Taylor to not have her parents around now that she has children. “[Nicoll and his wife] loved their kid. She was their dream and they treated her as the princess in the house,” he said.
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
Vea said when he heard about Nicoll’s disappearance, he was shocked. “I was just dumbfounded how that could happen.” He said that the disappearance was not in character with Nicoll at all. Especially with the way he left his house.
He also doesn’t believe that Nicoll would have had issues with anyone from his position as a peace officer. “Andy was never one who dealt with the frontline stuff. He was mostly behind the scene as a supervisor.”
Taylor says her dad was an intelligent, kind-hearted man who knew how to stand up for himself. Many times he would work with people that he knew were down on their luck and needed a bit of a hand to get started with life again. “He just treated them all with so much respect, and he ended up really being quite a lot of support for them,” she said.
Eventually, they moved out to an acreage near Breton. That was when Taylor’s mom was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer, and she only lived for another six months. She passed away on his birthday, two years prior to his disappearance.
Taylor said it was a devastating time for her father. “He was a little bit lost for some time there, but he was my best friend.”
With still no word on his whereabouts, this year Taylor is working to have Nicoll declared as deceased. She said with his career in the Navy, as a police officer and a firefighter, he deserves to have the full honours given to him, rather than just be a missing person. “No one has been able to pay any respects,” she said.
“My gut is telling me that somebody approached him on the property and something transpired,” she said. “I don’t know who or why.”
Nicoll didn’t like guns, and she believes that he would have gone along with whatever the situation was until he could get to a safe location.
Chick agrees with Taylor’s thoughts. “I think he was offering someone some help and there was some foul play.”
Vea wonders if maybe there was a hunting accident, and perhaps someone tried to cover it up.
“He didn’t have any enemies that anyone knows of, but being in law enforcement for that many years, it’s hard to know,” said Taylor.
Corporal Deanna Fontaine, a media liaison for the Alberta RCMP Missing Persons Unit, said “It can be confirmed that since the initial media release, Andrew George Nicoll, has been entered into the National Missing Persons Database and DNA has been obtained and is on file.”
Fontaine said RCMP are hoping that after this amount of time that someone will provide some answers. Fontaine says that if someone was scared to say something at the time, she hopes they will feel safe in coming forward now.
“If I knew for sure he was out there, I would tell him to come home and see his daughter and what a beautiful young lady she has become. She’s followed in his footsteps in a lot of ways. I wish he could see the eyes of his grandkids, too,” said Vea.
Anyone with information regarding Nicoll’s disappearance is urged to contact the Breton RCMP at 780-696-3520 or your local police. If you wish to remain anonymous, you can contact Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 (TIPS), online at www.P3Tips.com or by using the “P3 Tips” app available through the Apple App or Google Play Store.
What’s in a name? I’m glad you asked
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Classroom complexity an issue
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division.
Symposium puts focus on mental health
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School.
Shared history is a foundation for the future
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945.
