Cavendish Farms has announced a $2 million donation to the University of Prince Edward Island’s School of Sustainable Design Engineering to support sustainable farming solutions in the agricultural industry.

“With our roots on Prince Edward Island, Cavendish Farms is proud to support the UPEI School of Sustainable Design Engineering as they develop innovations for the agriculture industry here on the Island and across the globe,” said Robert K. Irving, President of Cavendish Farms. “Cavendish Farms has a strong commitment to the environment and sustainable farming practices. This donation will help continue to further sustainable farming for years to come.”

The UPEI School of Sustainable Design Engineering (SSDE) advances knowledge, grows industries, improves health, and betters society by developing engineers with exceptional design skills combined with global perspectives. Recognized nationally for program innovation, the SSDE works to find solutions to complex, real-world challenges through a collaborative team approach. Teams function like an engineering consulting firm where students work alongside global experts from higher learning, research and development, industry, and community partners.

Engineering is a key priority of UPEI’s friend- and fund-raising INSPIRE! Campaign. This donation is the largest single donation to the campaign to date.

“We are deeply grateful to Cavendish Farms for their generous support of our INSPIRE! Campaign, and for their vision to advance sustainable solutions of direct benefit to the agriculture industry and our communities,” said UPEI President and Vice-Chancellor Alaa Abd-El-Aziz. “The generosity of Cavendish Farms will enable a level of innovation pursuit that we have not experienced here on PEI before. On behalf of UPEI, I thank Cavendish Farms for being a catalyst for the creation of new knowledge by supporting the science needed to unlock areas of potential that exist between PEI’s most traditional and most rapidly emerging industries.”

About the INSPIRE! Campaign – Building upon the University of Prince Edward Island’s impressive reputation of providing quality education, the INSPIRE! Campaign ensures that UPEI will continue to evolve and deliver exceptional learning experiences and opportunities that prepare students for success. Launched on October 2, 2015, the Campaign has four key priorities that align with the University’s strategic plan: Engineering, Experiential and Global Learning, Veterinary Medicine, and Athletics.

About Cavendish Farms – Cavendish Farms is a family-owned company that produces quality frozen and fresh potato and appetizer products for the North American and international food industry. They operate six processing plants including three on Prince Edward Island.

The L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History has announced its first-ever list of associates for 2017–2020, made up of 37 scholars from Canada and the United States who, according to the Institute’s website, are “pushing the field of Canadian history in exciting new transnational directions…asking new questions and bringing new perspectives to the writing of Canadian history.” Among the first cohort are two distinguished members of UPEI’s Faculty of Arts: Dr. Lisa Chilton and Dr. Robert Dennis.

The Institute’s goal for its associates program is to build a diverse network of scholars inside and outside of Canada, and to support the work of both Anglo- and Francophone scholars from a variety of institutions and at different stages in their careers.

From the L.R. Wilson Institute’s website:

Dr. Chilton is an associate professor of history, a member of the graduate faculty of the Master of Arts in Island Studies, and the director of a new program in Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prince Edward Island. Her areas of research and publishing expertise are the history of international migrations and the history of British cultural imperialism, especially as they relate to pre-World War Two Canada. Her publications include Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s-1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2007), articles and chapters in multiple journals and edited collections (one of which won a CHA article prize in 2016), and a CHA booklet in the Immigration and Ethnicity in Canada Series, titled, Receiving Canada’s Immigrants: The Work of the State Before 1930 (2016). She is currently writing a book on the history of Canadian immigration from the 1760s to the Great Depression.

Dr. Dennis is an assistant professor of religious studies and an intellectual and religious historian with a specialization in Roman Catholicism. He is currently writing a history of Saint Dunstan’s University from 1955 to 1969. Dr. Dennis has recently completed a manuscript on how transatlantic developments in Catholic social thought influenced the formation of social Catholicism in English Canada during the Depression and Second World War years. This study focused on how Catholic intellectuals across the country engaged normative assumptions in classic liberalism and social democracy, reframing them, often with great radicalism, within frameworks of neo-Thomist/personalist and distributist philosophies. This project situated the experience of the Canadian Church within the broader context European Catholicism and international Catholic social thought as the Church restructures in the decades before the Second Vatican Council.  

“UPEI is delighted that two of our leading scholars have been recognized by the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History,” said Dr. Robert Gilmour, vice-president academic and research at UPEI. “Drs. Chilton and Dennis have impressive records as innovators, not only with respect to their research, but also as communicators of their work to the scholarly community and to their students.”

The associates will also help determine the winner of the annual Wilson Book Prize, an annual $10,000 award for the publisher of a book that makes Canadian scholarship accessible to a wide audience.

For a complete list of the Wilson Associates, go to https://wilson.humanities.mcmaster.ca/associates/.

The University of Prince Edward Island prides itself on people, excellence, and impact and is committed to assisting students reach their full potential in both the classroom and community. With roots stemming from two founding institutions—Prince of Wales College and Saint Dunstan’s University—UPEI has a reputation for academic excellence, research innovation, and creating positive impacts locally, nationally, and internationally. UPEI is the only degree granting institution in the province and is proud to be a key contributor to the growth and prosperity of Prince Edward Island. 

UPEI’s Climate Research Lab is proud to launch the 2018 edition of its PEI weather trivia calendar. “Some Weather We’re Having!” will be available for sale on December 21, 2017 at The Bookmark in the Confederation Court Mall, Murphy’s Pharmacies in the Charlottetown area, or at the UPEI Climate Research Lab on campus.

Co-authored by Don Jardine and Dr. Adam Fenech, the weather trivia calendar is filled with 365 stories about real local weather events from across the Island over the past 250 years and their impact on the everyday lives of Islanders.

“There are so many stories in there,” said Jardine, climate station manager. “There are some sad ones and some funny ones. This year we have a focus on extreme rainfall events and on storms in the Greenwich area.”

“Because of the nature of the Island and the way that we live, we’re very affected by weather. Sometimes it keeps us at home or away from school, and sometimes it drags us to the beaches because it’s so nice,” said Dr. Fenech, director of the lab. “But the weather really controls a lot of what we do and who we are. We say in our calendar ‘Our weather is our story.’ It’s the stories around the weather that are so intriguing.”

The 2018 edition of the calendar features:

• All new 365 stories of PEI weather trivia for every day of the year
• Twelve beautiful full-colour PEI weather photographs
• Stories of Prince Edward Island as told by our weather
• Information about Island extreme rainfall events and a history of storm events in the Greenwich area
• And much, much more!

Some examples of the stories in the calendar:

• January 9, 1963: Sixteen-year-old Kenneth Blacquiere of Summerside was adrift on an ice pan in the Northumberland Strait with 40 km/h winds and near zero visibility until the early morning. The car ferry, the Abegweit, was called from her Borden berth at 2:16 am with Captain Gideon Kean in control. Captain Kean worked out where he thought the boy could be, based on the tides, and found the boy about 2.5 miles offshore from the Seacow Head Lighthouse.
• April 20, 1907: Frank McKenna, who drove the mail between Charlottetown, Pownal, and Cherry Valley, had stopped at Mr. Murphy’s in Southport (Stratford), and left his horse standing outside unfastened. The horse decided to try the river ice back to Charlottetown on his own, having no trouble until about halfway across when he broke through. Mr. McKenna rushed to rescue the horse with a pole and was able to recover some mailbags, but unfortunately the horse was lost in the channel of the Hillsborough River.
• February 2, 1936: During snow storms over the previous two weeks, hundreds of pounds of lobsters washed up on the banks of the North Shore and near the North Cape. While the farmers were busy banking the gravel, fishermen were gathering up the lobsters for a mid-winter feed.
• June 21, 1899: Five girls were clam digging on the bar off the west end of Summerside during the afternoon low tide. They wandered along the bar until they finally found themselves surrounded by a rising tide. They started to wade ashore and only one, Angie Gallant, succeeded. She waded in many places up to her neck and arrived home at 4:30 pm in a very exhausted condition. The others, girls ranging in age from 7 to 11, tragically lost their lives.
• December 3, 2016: A seaweed diet dramatically cut the methane output of cows. A PEI dairy farmer from Seacow Pond, Joe Dorgan, harvested seaweed collected after storms washed it up on the beaches and fed it to his cattle. The seaweed saves food costs and also reduces greenhouse gas emissions (methane) by about 20 per cent versus normal cattle feed. The seaweed diet helps the cattle to be healthier and produce more milk.

The University of Prince Edward Island prides itself on people, excellence, and impact and is committed to assisting students reach their full potential in both the classroom and community. With roots stemming from two founding institutions—Prince of Wales College and Saint Dunstan’s University—UPEI has a reputation for academic excellence, research innovation, and creating positive impacts locally, nationally, and internationally. UPEI is the only degree granting institution in the province and is proud to be a key contributor to the growth and prosperity of Prince Edward Island

Third-year University of Prince Edward Island business student Colin Trewin is the winner of the inaugural Robert J. Connaughton Sr. Memorial Award.

Established by the late Robert J. Connaughton Sr.’s family, the award is given to a UPEI student who is a member of the Holland Hurricanes football team, or the UPEI track-and-field or hockey teams. 

Trewin plays with the senior men’s Island Mariners, of the Maritime Football League, and the Holland Hurricanes, of the Atlantic Football League. He is the research and policy coordinator for the UPEI Student Union, working on issues such as sexual violence and employment insurance reform. After he graduates in May 2019, he plans to attend law school.

“The financial assistance provided by this award will make an extraordinary contribution towards helping me achieve my goals,” said Trewin.

A resident of Massachusetts, Robert Connaughton Sr. was an avid sports fan, particularly at the scholastic and college levels. His six children and 11 grandchildren were all involved in high school and collegiate sports.

Robert Connaughton Sr. was a great fan of Saint Dunstan’s University’s and UPEI’s football programs in the 1960s and 1970s. His son Bobby Jr. played football for Saint Dunstan’s University and UPEI—Saint Dunstan’s is one of UPEI’s two founding institutions—and sons Dave and Neal for UPEI. He and his wife, Jane, came to Prince Edward Island as often as they could, attending UPEI hockey and football games during their visits. Two of his grandchildren (Ellen and Jared) were born on PEI. Jared Connaughton is a two-time track-and-field Olympian.

“On behalf of the Connaughton family, I congratulate Colin on being the first winner of the Robert J. Connaughton Sr. Memorial Award,” said Neal Connaughton.

Christmas came early for Larry and Lisa Walsh, of Second North River, New Brunswick, when their dog, Lupina, recovered the use of her legs after suffering a severe neck injury seven weeks ago.

Lupina, a two-and-a-half-year-old FS Brussels Griffon, fell down the stairs at her home on October 28 and, over the next couple of days, progressively lost her ability to walk. When Larry and Lisa brought their tiny dog to the Atlantic Veterinary College on October 30, she was almost completely paralyzed. She could still feel and move her toes, but she was in a lot of pain and could not walk or even stand.

A CT scan revealed that the first two vertebral segments in her neck were dislocated, causing very severe compression of her spinal cord and, in fact, almost transecting it. Small dogs like Lupina can be affected by a condition called “atlantoaxial subluxation,” which predisposes them to dislocation of these bones in the neck. Severely affected dogs can become permanently paralyzed. Surgery is the only treatment that is reliably effective, but it also carries significant risk.

On October 31, Dr. James Dundas, a board-certified small animal surgeon at AVC, performed a difficult surgical procedure on Lupina. He used two loops of a heavy suture line to “lasso” the two vertebrae together and bring them back into position, easing the pressure on the dog’s spinal cord and allowing it to heal. The operation was difficult because the surgery site was very near the spinal cord. Too much manipulation of the spinal cord could make the transection complete, or could even be fatal.

Lupina spent almost two weeks in the veterinary teaching hospital after surgery, slowly regaining motor skills, but she still could not walk or stand. After going home, she spent four weeks in a splinted bandage, followed by two weeks in a soft bandage. She came back to AVC once a week for four weeks for reassessments and dressing changes. Over time, she gradually regained the use of her legs.

During her recheck on December 19, Lupina showed her caregivers for the first time since her accident that she can walk.

“Today her bandage was removed, and she is walking beautifully!” said Dr. Shelly Shamir, a small animal surgery intern who assisted Dr. Dundas with the operation. “She still has some neurological deficits, but is improving every day. She is a very lucky girl to have survived and improved after such significant trauma to her neck.”

Larry and Lisa are thrilled to have their beloved Lupina back on her feet.

“Pet owners will understand why we go the extra mile to do whatever it takes to save the life of our dog,” said Larry. “Lupina is a much loved member of our family. Lisa and I are so thankful for everyone at AVC for their love and care for animals, and to have the hospital so close to us. Otherwise, we would not have our Lupina today.”

“Lupina’s name means She Wolf,” he added, “and she is one heck of a fighter.”
 

Teams from the UPEI Faculty of Business had a tremendous showing at the eleventh annual Montreal Exchange’s Options Trading Simulation. The ten-week competition pitted more than 1,500 teams from 38 universities against each other in a simulated exchange. Teams from UPEI took third and twelfth places.

Teams are given a starting balance of a notional $100,000 and have 10 weeks to trade in financial securities to make money and complete mandatory strategies.

UPEI's top team was “Billy Capital,” made up of Sam Aulie and Marcus Power. The team placed third overall, securing UPEI’s best ever result in terms of rank and ending portfolio value. They finished the competition with $254,807.75, benefitting early from a well-timed “put option”—a financial instrument which makes money when the underlying share price drops.

“We made a lot of our money right before Andrew Left (an activist short seller) went on the news and talked about Shopify being a sham,” said Aulie. “After that, the share price dropped 20 per cent and we made our bulk of the money there.”

For their efforts, the team won $2,500 of real money.

UPEI’s second best showing came from “Corporate Panthers,” Kearah Davis, Rudolph Al Aswad, Caroline Carey, and Yohannes Yosefe. The team’s ending balance was $151,038. With 288 trades over the 10-week competition, it speaks to the intense level of engagement and decision-making capabilities of our students. 

Congratulations!

The University of Prince Edward Island prides itself on people, excellence, and impact and is committed to assisting students reach their full potential in both the classroom and community. With roots stemming from two founding institutions—Prince of Wales College and Saint Dunstan’s University—UPEI has a reputation for academic excellence, research innovation, and creating positive impacts locally, nationally, and internationally. UPEI is the only degree granting institution in the province and is proud to be a key contributor to the growth and prosperity of Prince Edward Island. 

For the first time, the Atlantic Veterinary College has hired a wellness facilitator. Sapphire MacPhee has a bachelor’s degree in social work from Dalhousie University and has worked in the areas of preventing problem gambling and family violence. She is very interested in health and wellness and is currently working on a certificate in this field.

“Our students, faculty, and staff work hard, and we appreciate and thank them for their dedication,” said Dean Greg Keefe. “As outlined in our strategic plan, we want to support them with services and programs that improve their health and well-being and help them to grow. The creation of the position of wellness facilitator is one way to accomplish this goal. Welcome, Sapphire!”

Sapphire will work closely with Dr. Tammy Muirhead, director of wellness programming at AVC, and Dr. Leigh Lamont, associate dean of academic and student affairs, to promote positive mental health programming to students, faculty, and staff. She will help them develop coping skills, resiliency, and a healthy work-life balance.

She will look at the student experience and campus life culture to ensure AVC students have the healthiest educational experience possible and are aware of services available to them through UPEI, including Student Affairs, the Chaplaincy Centre, and the Health Centre.

“Sometimes you can lose your sense of ‘self’ when you are so immersed in something you love, whether you are a student, a teacher, or a staff member,” she said. “I want to teach them how to identify as a well-rounded individual, not only as an AVC student, faculty, or staff member.”

As well as being available for private, confidential meetings, Sapphire, along with Dr. Muirhead, will work with AVC’s student peer helpers and develop new outreach programming for students. She can be reached at sjmacphee@upei.ca or (902) 566-6788.

Both UPEI hockey teams are returning from the holiday break with new energy and feeling optimistic about the second half of the season. The UPEI men’s squad kicks off the weekend Friday evening at 7:00 pm with a game at home against St. Francis Xavier University. The game will be broadcast on Bell Aliant TV 1.

“It is important for us to get off to a good start in the second half,” said coach Forbes MacPherson. “We are in a battle for a play-off position, and there are only 12 games remaining in the regular season. We will need to be playing the right way to secure a play-off spot and to be a threat in the play-offs.”

The women get their shot at St. FX the next day at 3:00 pm.

“They have a very strong program with great balance upfront and a mobile defence core,” said coach Bruce Donaldson. “We need to stay out of the penalty box, take away their time and space, and control the boards if we want to have success. They typically take lots of shots so we need to keep them to the outside so we can defend well. Offensively, we need to take advantage of the opportunities presented to us. They don’t make many mistakes, so it’s important to capitalize on them when they happen.”

The men host the Dalhousie Tigers Saturday at 7:00 pm.

UPEI Athletics and Recreation is still offering a second-half package for UPEI Men’s Hockey so you won’t miss a second of the action. For $90, you receive:

• tickets to the seven remaining home games
• a playoff holding seat
• unlimited 2-for-1 at Domino’s Pizza
• a 10% off card for Source for Sports
• two buddy passes
• ticket redemption night, Saturday, February 10 vs St. Francis Xavier University at the Eastlink Centre during Hockey Day on PEI.

For more information, visit Panther Central or email lread@upei.ca. 

The University of Prince Edward Island community, and especially the UPEI Robertson Library, was saddened to learn of the recent death of UPEI Founder and retired librarian Franklin L. (“Frank”) Pigot.

“Students, faculty, and researchers near and far continue to benefit from Frank’s work with our archival and special collections,” said Donald Moses, University Librarian. “He built those collections from the ground up, and made them into something that PEI and its University can continue to cherish and build upon for generations to come.”

A proud native of Mount Stewart and alumnus of Prince of Wales College, Frank was appointed as the first Prince Edward Island Collection Librarian at the UPEI Kelley Library in the early 1970s. Beginning with just a handful of PEI books, he spent the next 25 years developing a peerless collection of Island-related publications. By the time Frank retired in 1997, the PEI Collection numbered some 12,000 titles, complemented by extensive vertical and clippings files, and was described by historian Dr. G. Edward (“Ed”) Macdonald as, “the finest assemblage of Islandia anywhere”. Alongside the PEI Collection, Frank also developed the University Archives into an important collection of documentation relating to UPEI and its two forebears, Saint Dunstan’s University and Prince of Wales College. Frank further complemented this remarkable collections development work with methodical indexing of relevant content, especially in Island periodicals, effectively building a massive card-file database, encompassing more than 100,000 entries.

Frank received the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation’s Meritorious Achievement Award in 1998, in recognition of his many thousands of hours of care and skill in developing the PEI Collection and University Archives. In receiving the award, Frank, with his trademark quiet modesty, paid tribute to the support of Library colleagues and of numerous donors—most notably the Saint Dunstan’s University Alumni Association—in fostering the PEI Collection and University Archives’ remarkable growth.

Even after retirement, Frank continued to serve the Robertson Library as a volunteer, and his ongoing dedication to the University community was honoured with his recognition as a UPEI Founder in 2004. The Founders Day citation highlighted, rightly, that Frank had been, “breaking new ground,” in building up both the PEI Collection and University Archives, essentially from nothing, into matchless cultural and research resources.

In addition to his accomplishments as a librarian, Frank was also a distinguished scholar. He authored two books, John Stewart of Mount Stewart (1973) and A History of Mount Stewart, Prince Edward Island (1975): the latter book has just been reissued, in an expanded and illustrated edition, and tribute was paid to Frank’s pathbreaking work at the well-attended launch for the new edition in December. In recognition of Frank’s remarkable knowledge and research skills in the field of Island history, he was also invited to contribute several entries to the prestigious Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

The Robertson Library is now preparing a special tribute to Frank’s legacy: further details will be announced as they are finalized.

UPEI extends its condolences to Frank’s family, friends, and former colleagues. Flags will be flown at half-mast in his memory. Read the obituary

-Prepared by Simon Lloyd, University Archivist & Special Collections Librarian

This winter’s UPEI writer-in-residence will be Steven Heighton, award-winning novelist, poet, short-story writer, and essayist. He will give a public reading on Tuesday, February 6 at 7:30 pm and will lead two writing workshops on Saturday, February 10. Both events will be in the Faculty Lounge of UPEI’s SDU Main Building.

Raised in Toronto and northern Ontario, Heighton travelled and worked in western Canada, Australia, and Asia, studied at Queen’s University, and settled in Kingston, Ontario, where he writes full time. His distinctions include several gold medals for fiction and poetry from the National Magazine Awards and the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Poetry for The Waking Comes Late. He has been writer-in-residence at several universities and has led writing workshops in diverse settings including The Banff Centre, the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan, and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.

His morning workshop (9:30 am to 12:00 pm) will feature “re-enactive” techniques, which allow writers “to create sentences or passages of great vividness and sensual intensity. To work re-enactively is to embody, in the full sensory meaning of that word, whatever you're writing about, rather than just describing it,” explained Heighton.

In the afternoon workshop (1:30 pm to 4:00 pm), writers will practice “homophonic translation.” This exercise involves “translating” from a language participants don’t know, just on the basis of sound. “The results,” said Heighton, “are always funny and often spectacularly good—and sometimes also moving. The process is a wonderful way to make writers approach their work with greater acoustical/musical sensitivity rather than simply, flatly saying something about how they feel.”

The workshop are $40 each, or $70 for the whole day. Seniors and students pay $35 for one or $60 for the day. To register, see the UPEI Winter’s Tales Authors’ Reading Series Facebook site.

Steven Heighton’s visit and the UPEI Writer-in-Residency program are sponsored by UPEI’s Dean of Arts, the Vice-President Academic/Research, and the UPEI English Department, with generous support from The Canada Council for the Arts.

The University of Prince Edward Island prides itself on people, excellence, and impact and is committed to assisting students reach their full potential in both the classroom and community. With roots stemming from two founding institutions—Prince of Wales College and Saint Dunstan’s University—UPEI has a reputation for academic excellence, research innovation, and creating positive impacts locally, nationally, and internationally. UPEI is the only degree granting institution in the province and is proud to be a key contributor to the growth and prosperity of Prince Edward Island.