One year ago the city celebrated the Canada Winter Games. 250 News archive

Prince George, B.C. – Today is party day for the entire family at the Canada Games Plaza as the community gathers for the final weekend of the Celebrate Prince George Winter Festival.

City of Prince George Civic Events Co-ordinator Jen Tkachuk says “the plaza party starts at 5 pm with live performances on the BCLC Center Stage which will continue throughout the evening.”  “Our headliner is BC/DC, which is an AC/DC tribute band which is supposed to be incredible.”  They’ll be playing from 8 till 9 pm when, says Tkachuk, “there’s going to be fireworks, a good way to finish it off with a bang, literally.”

There will also be all sorts of activations and demonstrations taking place in the plaza, along with four different food vendors that will be on site.  And she says “on top of that the Two Rivers Art Gallery is also open until about 9 o’clock (tonight).  It’ll be free admission so if you want a place to go and warm up you can check out the art gallery at the same time and it’s just an extension of that party.”

Mayor Lyn Hall will be on hand to address the revellers, as will MLAs Shirley Bond and Mike Morris and Art Kaehn, chair of the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George board of directors.

Tkachuk says “one of the goals (of the plaza party) is to re-create the energy and the spirit that we felt during the 2015 Canada Winter Games, and today marks the one-year anniversary of the opening ceremonies held last year.  So we’re encouraging everyone to brush off those green jackets or bust out the Games gear and come down to the plaza and really celebrate how well we did last year and a what a successful games we were able to put on.”

As far as the Celebrate Prince George Winter Festival is concerned Tkachuk says “Tourism and the City have gotten together and created a granting program to be able to give funds to community stakeholders to keep this momentum going.  So this will be the only year that the City per se and Tourism put on the event.  In the future it will be our stakeholders who can apply to put on events in the months of either February for the Winter, or July for the Summer Festival.”

So the respective festivals will run for the entire month in question, with a total of $30,000 available through the granting program for each festival, to be split up by   the successful stakeholder applicants.  Tkachuk says “the application deadline has passed for the July festival.  We got a ton of incredible applications and we have our work cut out for us to try to pick which ones get the funding.  There’s going to be a lot of really wonderful events taking place in July of 2016 as the first annual Summer Festival.”

She says there will be multiple venues for the summer festival.  “There’s a combination of applications that have come forward.  Some are for the plaza, some for Lheidli T’enneh Memorial Park, some are for Veterans’ Plaza, so it really depends on the stakeholder and what their vision is.  And again it’s for the whole month of July.  It’s going to be an exciting time.”

But that’s five-and-a-half months away yet.  Today is all about the Party in the Plaza.  Everyone is welcome and it’s free!