Northern B.C. lotto winner uses windfall to buy lawn tractor
Louise Kerr, who won $500,000, is shown in this photo provided by the BC Lottery Corporation.
The first thing a woman in Prince George did after winning a $500,000 jackpot was order a new lawn tractor, according to the BC Lottery Corporation.
Louise Kerr hit it big in the May 9 LottoMax draw, splitting the Maximillion prize with one other lucky player.
'I was at my kitchen table, checking my tickets,' Kerr told the BCLC, which shared the news of her win in a news release Tuesday.
'I just didn't believe it! I double checked the numbers.'
After ordering the tractor, Kerr said she's still figuring out how to spend the rest of her money but plans to use some of it to get some repairs done around the house.
'I can hire people to do it. This just frees you up,' she told the BCLC.
The odds of matching all seven numbers and winning the Maxmillions draw are three in 99,884,400.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
Rotting fish-sauce plant whose stench torments Newfoundland town will be cleaned up
Bottles of the fish sace produced at a long-abandoned plant in St. Mary's, N.L., are shown strewn outside the building on Thursday June 12, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sarah Smellie ST. MARY'S — A coastal Newfoundland town besieged for decades by the fetid stench wafting from an abandoned fish-sauce factory has finally received good news. Steve Ryan, the mayor of St. Mary's, N.L., said he nearly broke down in tears when officials with the Newfoundland and Labrador government told him the province would foot the bill to clean up the festering site. The promise brings residents close to the end of a decades-long ordeal that has kept them indoors on beautiful days, lest the smell get in their hair and clothes. 'I get emotional just talking about it,' the 53-year-old said, shaking his head outside his grocery store a few minutes from the town. 'It's an everyday thing with the smell — people can't do normal stuff, like have a barbecue on their deck or hang out their laundry,' he added. 'It gets into your nose, it gets into your mouth, it just gags you.' The decaying Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company Ltd. building sits on the shoreline of the town of about 300 people, just steps away from the ocean. It first opened in 1990, bringing about two dozen much-needed jobs to the area, Ryan said. But the owner abandoned it about a decade later, after extended legal battles about food safety complaints. More than 100 oozing vats of fermenting fish remain in the crumbling building. Liquids from the 11,500-litre tanks once ran into the harbour through a broken drain pipe, but the federal fisheries department demanded the run-off system be sealed with concrete, Ryan said. Now the fluids pool in the plant, creating a putrid stew roughly 30 centimetres deep, Ryan said. On a warm Thursday afternoon last week, the odour inside the building was dense and wet, as if it could be squeezed through the fingers of a fist. It was a good day, Ryan said. In the late summer and fall, when the winds are blowing just right, the smell engulfs the nearby houses, school and baseball field. St. Mary's is a quiet, picturesque town on a sparkling ocean inlet, just minutes away from a whale-watching beach popular with tourists and locals. It would be a perfect spot for a few B&Bs, but the smell discourages anyone from trying to attract visitors, Ryan said. 'How would you advertise?' he asked. 'Look what we have as our view and our smell?' But now there is hope. A spokesperson with Newfoundland and Labrador's Department of Environment and Climate Change confirmed Friday the province has told the town to issue a request for proposals for a consultant to plan and oversee the plant's cleanup. Money for the remediation work has been set aside in the provincial budget. Ryan credited former premier Andrew Furey for taking an interest and setting the funds aside. International media attention helped too, he said. 'To be forgotten about for so long, and all of a sudden now … being successful in getting this cleanup funded,' his voice trailed off and he shook his head again. 'Over the past 10 years, we've dealt with two or three ministers, two or three premiers, a couple of federal ministers that ... were in no way helpful, they probably held us up,' he added. Ryan wouldn't say how much he expects it to cost — he doesn't want to jeopardize the town's chances of getting a good price the province can afford, he said. But previous assessments indicate it may exceed $1 million. It's a price tag far out of reach for the volunteer council in a town with just a few hundred tax payers, he said. The municipality voted to take ownership of the site earlier this year, he said. It was the only way the province could then step in and help clean it up. Once the work is done, he hopes the council will put the plant site up for auction and another business will step in. But they'll have to have a clear exit plan so the situation doesn't happen again, he said. In the meantime, residents know the smell will likely get worse as the site is torn apart before it gets better, Ryan said. 'We have no issue with that,' he said. 'This has got to be done.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2025. Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press
CBC
an hour ago
- CBC
Thousands of N.L. commercial trade workers looking for work as megaprojects wrap up
Trades N.L. estimates 74 per cent of its members are out of work in this province. The CBC's Jenna Head takes a look at the reasons why, and how they're keeping their skills sharp.
CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
Buy Canadian moment creates opportunity for Roots and its domestic leather business
TORONTO — Rifling through the Roots Corp. product archives on a recent Thursday morning, CEO Meghan Roach is surrounded by the kind of heritage 'most consumer brands would die to have.' In every direction she turns are racks of leather jackets spanning the company's 52 years. Some are replicas of custom pieces gifted to Toronto Raptors players for their 2019 championship win, the cast of Saturday Night Live for its fiftieth anniversary or the Jamaican bobsled team that inspired the 'Cool Runnings' film. Others are even more rare: a forest green jacket stitched with a floral and friendship bracelet motif for pop star Taylor Swift, and one adorned with snazzy sunglasses and piano key pockets that marked Elton John's retirement from touring, the lining of which features 56 years of albums. What they have in common is an origin story that began with the building Roach is standing in — the Roots leather factory in north Toronto. Chances are, if you bought a leather bag or jacket from the retailer, they came from the Caledonia Road site, which has given Roots bragging rights in an era where everyone wants to buy Canadian. 'Every time I bring someone through the factory, they kind of look at me and say, 'I just didn't realize you did this here,'' Roach said of the facility where dozens of workers cut leather, stitch it together, emboss it and ultimately, handcraft up to 8,000 pieces monthly. The Canadian operation is a rarity these days, after clothing manufacturing largely migrated overseas in the sixties, when brands wanted to reduce costs and offload repetitive and sometimes time-consuming tasks. Roots has not been entirely immune to the allure of international production. It sources some of its clothing in Asia and Europe, but designs everything in Canada, which remains the heart of its leather business. Domestic production has been 'very challenging,' Roach said. Canadian suppliers have been dwindling, so the company has had to look to Italy and France to source leather and even farther afield for zippers. For a time, it had a Canadian company helping it with piping on bags, but they went out of business, so Roots bought its machinery and trained staff to use it. The decision was a point of pride long before shoppers started letting patriotism rule their pocketbooks this year in hopes of countering U.S. President Donald Trump and his tariff whims. The moment has shoppers rallying around any company with a shred of Canadiana so Roach is determined not to let it slip away without customers learning more about the brand's, well, roots. Founders Michael Budman and Don Green were raised in Michigan but met at Camp Tamakwa in Ontario's Algonquin Park in 1963 and 10 years later, decided to head north of the border to start Roots. Initially, they specialized in negative-heel shoes, which reduced pressure on backs, but when the footwear sold out in less than a month and spawned a waiting list, Budman and Green dreamt bigger. They started pumping out varsity jackets, leather bags ideal for weekend getaways and salt-and-pepper sweats. Eventually, they became a Canadian staple with stores dotting the country, a discount airline shuttling people from coast to coast, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck starring in ads and a coveted contract to outfit the nation's Olympic team. Nowadays, the stores remain but the airline has folded, the business no longer sells shoes, ads aren't quite so star-studded and Lululemon Athletica Inc. outfits Team Canada. Budman and Green? They sold a majority stake in Roots in 2015 to Searchlight Capital Partners L.P., a firm split between Toronto, New York, Miami and London. Roach worked at the firm before joining Roots. When she took the top job in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, she was inheriting a brand Canadians adored but that needed to get some of its groove back. 'Because it's 50 years old, you have to be really careful in terms of how you modernize it,' she said. 'You can't just wake up one day and change everything, so we've been slowly over the last five or six years, making small tweaks and changes.' Having heard from customers who wanted less dominant logos on their clothes and softer fabrics across more products, Roach introduced new lines with minimal branding and expanded the brand's use of comfier materials. She sold the items in stores slowly being revamped to have a brighter and lighter feel that is less reminiscent of a cabin and more like a burst of freshness from the great outdoors. She also decided Roots needed to do a better job of telling its story, so it invested more heavily in digital marketing and brought on brand ambassadors. Some of those efforts are working because Roots appears to have stronger margins and renewed consumer interest, said Liza Amlani, principal of Retail Strategy Group in an email. But she still feels the brand has work to do because 'not all stores are consistent in the customer experience and many are packed to the brim with product' that needs to keep evolving if Roots wants to hang onto customers long after the buy Canadian bubble bursts. These days they're marketing a Canada collection of red-and-white apparel, T-shirts dedicated to local waterways like Okanagan Lake and leather goods like an emoji bag charm with maple leaves for eyes. Roach insists the unabashedly Canadian items aren't a sign that other markets aren't still a priority. When she joined Roots, she relaunched the brand in China and began plotting to expand its presence even further into the U.S., where it has two stores. That plan is still on the table, even now that Trump has chosen Canada as one of his top tariff targets, because she says, 'there's a huge amount of potential there once we get through the current volatility.' 'The thing about being with a brand that's been around for 50 years is you have to look past the short-term nature ... like not what's happening next month or next year but what's going to happen over the next 10 to 15 years,' she said after strolling the leather factory. 'You're thinking what do I have to do and invest in and what are the green shoots I have to build today for this business to be successful more over a longer period of time?' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2025. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press
