Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Mar 01/02) - They're not back, after all. At least, not both of them.

The Caribou Carnival board has rejected Christiane Boyd's application for the 2002 Royal Quest. Boyd, who was one of last year's Caribou queens, was handed a letter Wednesday morning, after a carnival board meeting the previous evening.

Christiane Boyd is confused by the carnival board's decision, and likens her plight to that of Jamie Sale and David Pelletier.

In the letter, which was signed by carnival president Bernie Bauhaus, she was told "it is the Caribou Carnival Board's opinion that ... you would not be willing to participate within the spirit of Carnival."

Boyd sold 9,000 tickets last year, helping propel the carnival to record sales of 55,000 tickets. But when she was forced to share the crown with fellow contestant Gisele Forget, Boyd became entangled in an imbroglio which went so far as to have her threaten legal action.

Boyd applied this year because the winner gets a trip to the Dominican Republic. She wanted to do development work there.

Forget's application was accepted. She and nine other contestants begin selling tickets today.

"I'm upset," said Boyd. "What am I supposed to think, when I've been treated like something you scrape off your shoes and then handed something like this?"

Boyd compared her plight to that of Canada's pairs figure skaters, and asked the community's input on what she should do.

"It's like saying that Jamie Sale and David Pelletier are not willing to participate in the spirit of the Olympics," she said, "and that the International Olympic Committee and Canada were wrong to support them."

Bauhaus defended the decision.

"Basically we're just trying to promote carnival in a positive light," he said. "That's the whole thing with carnival: a positive spirit, a fun environment. I have a definition of carnival spirit in my mind and that's that. So we all agreed that no, she wouldn't be able to do it willingly (comply with that spirit), so we'd have to monitor her every movement. We're not ready to do that."

Bauhaus said there was a unanimous vote among board members. None of the board members contacted by Yellowknifer would comment on the situation.

"We basically looked at the application, and there were discussions with her and so forth, and we basically said no," said Bauhaus. "I'm not going to go around and define the spirit of carnival for you. It was just a general consensus."

The carnival has ordered 60,000 raffle tickets for contestants to sell. At $1 each, the ticket sales pull in about half of the carnival's budget. But Bauhaus said he wasn't particularly concerned about the financial impact of denying Boyd's application.

"It may have an effect, but really, money isn't everything," he said. "Carnival has gotten by in years past with little or no money. If we have no money people have come to carnival's rescue over the years."

Meanwhile, Forget hopes to better her selling record last year, which was just short of 9,000.

Forget said she is running again because of "the pride I had last year of what I had accomplished." This is the third and last year she will run, she said, and she's looking forward to helping out the carnival's bottom line.

She said she doesn't have a strategy in place yet, but is visualizing success.

"I have to believe I will (win)," she said.