The art of compromise — a case study

I spent three days in Prince Rupert the end of last week, the first time I’d visited that city in about 30 years or so. It’s a beautiful place, though I’m not sure I’d want to spend a winter there.

Reason for the visit was that I joined several other Kamloops Chamber of Commerce board members at the AGM and convention of the B.C. chamber. It’s similar to the annual Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in that there are workshops, speeches, banquets, luncheons and plenty of networking. The tangible work gets done at policy resolution sessions, in which member chambers present proposals for new government policies or initiatives, and ask delegates to back them up.

This was my second B.C. chamber AGM, and I learned a couple of new things. During a lively debate on plastic bags, I spoke in favour of a resolution to ban them, only to find out I was taking the opposite position to that of the rest of the Kamloops board members. I got quite a bit of razzing about that.

This is a distinctly different approach than that taken by local City councillors at UBCM, where they only occasionally agree ahead of time to vote together on a particular issue. On most resolutions, it’s a free vote.

Not so at the B.C. chamber AGM, where delegates are expected to fall into line with whatever position their home chamber takes. I’m not entirely comfortable with that system, and it gave me a hint of how frustrating life must be for our MLAs and MPs when they disagree with party policy and have to speak and vote against their conscience.

The next day, with the blessing of my fellow Kamloops board members, I spoke in favour of a resolution to ask the provincial government to establish a consistent formula on the ratio for various property tax categories. As it is now, City councils are forced into a political game at each annual budget, weighing the number of votes at stake from residential taxpayers versus those in business and industry.

Almost always, residential wins out, paying a lower property tax rate than business and industry due to power at the ballot box.

Former Prince George mayor Colin Kinsley, whom I got to know pretty well back when I was still at City Hall, spoke against the resolution, saying it infringed on the autonomy of City councils. I didn’t think too much about our opposing positions at the time, but B.C. chamber governor Al McNair remarked to me later that evening that the provincial chamber has had a concern for some time about politicians and ex-politicians becoming involved in chambers.

The reason, he said, is that there’s a tendency for them to be defensive of City councils rather than acting and speaking from the perspective of the business community’s best interests. McNair said my turn at the microphone had demonstrated that ex-politicians are capable of making the transition to a business perspective.

I thought his point was an important one. When people change community roles, they often aren’t able to change hats, and continue thinking the way they did in their previous allegiances.

When I temporarily left the newspaper business to go into local politics, I had no difficulty shifting my thinking. When I went back to The Daily News, likewise. I sometimes get kidded about my occasional feuds with media while I was mayor, and about the fact I’m now back to criticizing politicians, but you have to decide what perspective you are acting from or you create confusing and ineffective messages. (That doesn’t mean, though, that you ignore your own principles or beliefs for the sake of fitting in.)

It illustrates why different interests can’t always see eye to eye, and why compromise is so important in everyday community life.

How do we know how many swine flu cases there are?

It was just after 11 p.m. when I heard the door shut. Syd was home from a four-day business trip to the Coast.

Her timing was perfect — I was lying in bed beginning to feel sorry for myself.

“How’d everything go?” she asked.

“I seem to have a thing happening with my stomach,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, there was definitely something going on with my stomach. And all the associated piping. At that point, a voice inside me started saying, “Run. Run now!”

Fortunately, I heeded the warning, sprinting into the bathroom just in time.

“I love you,” Syd said when I crawled back to bed. “But I’m moving to the couch.”

From then on, about every half hour, my totally confused bodily functions kept me staggering back and forth from bed to bathroom and back. It was exhausting.

Finally, around 6 a.m., there were signs of cessation.

“Stay at least 10 feet away from me for seven days,” Syd advised as she came in, bleary eyed, from the living room. “That’s what they say.”

“No problem,” I moaned.

“Seriously. And I think we better find out if it’s the swine flu and you’re going to kill off half of Kamloops.”

“It’s gastro enteritis, not the swine flu,” I said.

“We better find out, anyway,” she said, and left.

When she came back, she dropped a few sheets of paper a safe distance from the bed and said, “I looked it up on the Internet. It says nausea, diarrhea and vomiting are sometimes among the symptoms for swine flu.”

I was still skeptical, but reluctantly groped for the printouts and read what they had to say about swine flu.

The Public Health Agency of Canada confirmed Syd’s research. The swine flu virus, it said, is highly contagious. People who suspect they have it should keep themselves isolated for a week.

This convinced me I should at least do the responsible thing and follow whatever clear procedures I was sure the medical health community had laid out for anyone with the flu.

According to the bumph Syd printed out from the Interior Health Authority, I should call HealthLink B.C. for further advice. So, after reporting in to work that I was taking a sick day, I dialled the HealthLink number.

A nice gentleman who answered the phone asked me the nature of my complaint and noted the call might be monitored for quality assurance purposes. (Always a good idea when dealing with life or death situations.)

“I’m telling you, it was awful,” I began. “It was green, it was purple, it was —.”

“And how may I help you?” he interrupted, pleasantly, of course.

I explained I just wanted to know how to proceed, in view of the swine flu thing.

He decided he should pass me on to a nurse for a consult. Good, I thought. This is progress.

“I’m required to state, first of all, that I’m not qualified to give a diagnosis over the phone,” said the nurse in his preamble.

After listening to my sad story, he said, “Have you been to Mexico?”

“Not since 1987,” I said. “We had this great hotel right on the beach —“

“Do you know anyone who’s been there in the last few months?”

“Well, usually, half of Kamloops has been there by this time of year –“

“No, I mean, specifically, as in names.”

“Well, no.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line. He was likely either checking to make sure the quality-assurance recording system was functioning, or calling over his co-workers to get a load of this one.

“Perhaps you should see your doctor, or go into a clinic.”

“Oh,” I said. “I was hoping you might actually give me a clue as to how we narrow this thing down. Will my doctor be able to test me for it?”

“Not likely,” he said. “It doesn’t sound as though you’re seriously ill. They’re only testing in the most serious cases. Everybody who’s ever seen a picture of Mexico wants to be tested for swine flu right now, and they just can’t keep up.”

He had one more piece of advice. “You should stay hydrated. Gaterade mixed 50-50 with water is good.”

Thanking him, I hung up and dialled my doctor’s office. “We’re full right up today,” said the receptionist after I told my story. “We have no openings at all.”

Thus ended my swine flu quest. Instead, I boned up on gastro enteritis, and decided to go with the option of a three-day contagious period after the cessation of symptoms.

Meanwhile, Syd tossed me a pencil and a note pad. “Jot down everything you’ve touched in this house during the last 48 hours,” she ordered. “You know, the phone, the TV remote. One can’t be too careful.”

And here I am, back at work. Either I had the fastest case of swine flu on record, or my original diagnosis was correct. But it does make one wonder, when we hear all these stories about how many confirmed cases of swine flu there are — how the heck does anyone really know?

There could be thousands more cases out there, calling Healthlink and being advised to stop whining and drink plenty of fluids.

Real reason Liberals won in Kamloops

Like everyone else, I’ve been analyzing why things went the way they did Tuesday. What did the Liberals do right, what did the NDP do wrong?

Then, as I was looking at our front page the other morning, it came clear. There, on page one, was a picture of Kevin Krueger and Terry Lake doing huggies.

To look at them, they don’t have much in common. Krueger has been in politics for 14 years after a career with one of the most unpopular agencies on the planet, ICBC.

Lake spays and neuters for a living.

Krueger is a big teddy bear, Lake makes a big deal out of staying fit. Krueger has a voice like a truck, Lake is a sports car.

But, they are the same in one essential way — they both have facial hair. Very different facial hair, but it’s a commonality, nonetheless.

Krueger looks like he just got back in town after a two-week fishing trip with the buds. Put a bow-tie on Lake and he could sell vacuum cleaners door to door.

Now, look at the NDP. No facial hair. Tom Friedman, clean cut. Doug Brown, well, not much hair there at all.

Kamloops is supposedly a bellwether place when it comes to provincial elections, and it is, but there’s a reason for it. Look back at our past MLAs, at least those who survived for any period of time, and you’ll notice they all had beards.

For example, the just-retired and always dapper Claude Richmond, one of the longest-serving MLAs in B.C. history. Most of the time, he sports a full, nicely trimmed beard.

Then there was Art Charbonneau, arguably one of the best education ministers B.C. has ever had. And Rafe Mair, the former environment minister and now somewhat retired prognosticator.

Now look at our MLAs who got turfed. Cathy McGregor, for one. No facial hair. Phil Gaglardi, Bud Smith, Gerry Anderson — none of them had beards, none of them lasted. Well, Phil Gaglardi lasted 20 years, but people eventually got tired of the fact he never grew a beard.

Political scientists advise politicians to stay clean shaven. People don’t trust politicians with beards, they say. Tell that to Abraham Lincoln. The reason Barack Obama will never reach the status of Abraham Lincoln is that he admits he is incapable of growing a beard.

This is why Lake’s election team insisted he grow that dorky little goatee back before the campaign started. He’d shaved it off for awhile, and actually looked like a human being instead of a Klingon. His campaign advisors, all of whom happen to live around here, as opposed to Toronto, were wise to the fact that Kamloopsians have a thing about beards.

This is why it’s not a good idea to bring in people from Ontario to run your campaign. Salome Cerqueria is from Toronto, where hairless people walk around in suits and ties. How was she to know?

Thus, Friedman got clobbered and Brown — who could have won it with a nice beard — was edged out by a talking goatee.

By the time Cerqueria caught on, it was too late. She started refusing to let anyone see or talk to Brown, for fear they would notice he was beardless. Even on election night, she clung to faint hope, keeping him behind closed doors and out of sight.

Fourteen years ago, when a bearded Kevin Krueger defeated a clean-shaven Fred Jackson, the latter also hid in a room on election night, refusing to come out. Again, embarrassed at his beardlessness.

It’s notable that Brown polled very well in the rural areas of Kamloops-North Thompson, where they don’t like beards nearly so much. The attitude up there is summed by Barriere resident Bob George, who wrote awhile back that, “If I were king I wish Lake would shave off that goatee. Terrible looking things.”

Urban dweller Rod Andrew, on the other hand, wrote just a few days ago that, “At the beginning of this election campaign, Terry Lake appeared to be the ideal candidate for the Liberals: an ex-mayor, a soccer player, a dog-lover, and with a beard.”

Mind you, Andrew (who usually has a beard himself) later changed his mind but, at face value, so to speak, Lake was the man.

While beards are an essential political accoutrement in Kamloops, they don’t go over nearly as well in Victoria. Take a look at the cabinet — a pretty clean-shaven group.

While Premier Campbell can look scruffy as hell by the end of a long day on the campaign trail, I don’t recall him ever wearing a beard, so I assume he’s not a fan.

Remember, Krueger spent years on the backbenches, refusing to shave, before he finally cleaned up and Campbell gave him a cabinet job. Then he grew his beard back.

It’s fairly common knowledge that Lake and Campbell have had private discussions about possible cabinet portfolios. It may be that Campbell is advising him to lose the goatee.

If the premier has any smarts at all, though, and I’m fairly sure he does, he’ll recognize the fact that, to be elected in Kamloops, facial hair is a prerequisite, and he will leave well enough alone.

By the way, if Lake has any pretense of staying slim and trim, he can forget it. After a few years of official banquets, cake-cuttings and eating fast food on the run, he’ll pack it on.

Twenty years from now, our MLAs will be two chubby bald guys — with grey facial hair.

Producing website a whole new experience

Election  nights, I usually spend some time guesting with one of the electronic media, then visiting a couple of campaign offices before sashaying into the office to fire off an editorial.

Last night was different — I actually had to put in some work. In fact, I never made it out of the office. City editor Susan Duncan and I handled editing and some phone call duties while reporters were rushing about out in the field, grabbing interviews and staying on top of the evening’s events.

The most fun, though, was working with our new website. It being just a couple of weeks old, this was our first chance to use it during an election. Robert Koopmans, who also happens to be an excellent photographer, was assigned to be the web reporter, filing feature updates every half hour or so.

The system we’d worked out went pretty well. Robert emailed Susan his copy and pictures from his laptop, Susan gave them a quick look, then sent them over to me. My job was to format the pictures, go into the website system and create the files, then post them to the website.

The technology takes a bit of getting used to and, frankly, still has a few bugs to work out. Last night, though, it worked just fine for the most part, and by pushing the system hard we learned quite a bit about how to get the most out of it.

We’re experiencing a huge increase in hits on the website since we changed over from the old one. We also get a lot of comments posted about stories, and the number of votes for our online polls quickly runs into several hundred. On the subject of STV, it topped a thousand, and I expect this week’s poll on water meters will at least match that.

The new website, of course, raises the whole question of whether newspapers should even get involved in such things. Their business is the printed page — how much information should people get without paying for it?

That question doesn’t even matter if your print edition is a freebie, but when readers support you by buying your paper six days a week, it’s a little trickier. The answer is, though, that the website doesn’t, and can’t ,provide the depth and breadth of news and information that a daily newspaper can.

It’s value added; it complements the paper rather than competes with it. And it’s turning out to be a ball producing it.

Campaign workers feel the pressure

It’s very often the case that candidates are easier to deal with than their campaign teams. This provincial election campaign has exhibited flashes of that, though, for the most part, the folks who toil passionately for their candidates have been co-operative and helpful.

This evening, though, I received a call from Brenda Craig, a former national television reporter who is currently a communications manager for Terry Lake, running as a Liberal in Kamloops-North Thompson.

I was “compelled,” she informed me, to publish a letter she had just emailed rebutting a letter to the editor from former teacher Rod Andrew in Saturday’s edition, explaining why Andrew isn’t going to vote for Lake. Andrew wrote that Lake doesn’t have the qualities he wants in an MLA, including the fact he’s known to be somewhat temperamental.

This cheesed Craig off and she wanted a chance to answer Andrew, now. I let her know I didn’t much appreciate being called on a Sunday evening to deal with a response to something that had been published a day and a half before, and, in fact, was based on comments that had been published several times before.

I can’t say the conversation was entirely cordial as I don’t react well to political staff members who tell me I must do something or they will report me to the B.C. Press Council. Threats tend to make me less amenable to meeting a request, but in the end one has to deal with the validity of the request rather than basing your actions on what you think of the person on the other end of the phone.

Despite the fact Lake readily acknowledges he’s temperamental (I worked with him on council for three years and he’s always been candid about it), bottom line was one of his campaign team felt it important to answer, and the request to do so was fair enough. So, a part of my evening has been spent pulling apart an Opinion page that was already complete and on its way through the production department to the press room, but I got’er done.

Lake isn’t the only one who has a campaign worker who feels free to make demands of the press, though. There’s Salomé Cerqueira, the Ontario NDP worker brought in to work on Doug Brown’s attempt to defeat Lake in Kamloops-North Thompson.

Earlier in the campaign, Cerqueira ordered us not to contact Brown directly under any circumstances. All requests for contact must go through her. Excuse me?

The best way to deal with such control people is to ignore them, and I must say we’ve never had a problem getting hold of Brown direct. Remember when Chad Moats tried the gatekeeper approach with mayoral candidate Murphy Kennedy?

Just like candidates, campaign workers come in all types. Sometimes the pressure of a campaign just makes them act in ways they shouldn’t, and one must make allowances. I must say, the local campaign managers — those who head up the campaign teams and have the difficult job of keeping things on track, and who have the real pressure on them — have been great to work with.

Hanson Brothers enter local election fray

Politics in B.C. is often referred to as a blood sport. Comparisons are drawn to mud wrestling, hockey and other pugilistic endeavors.

Indeed, Liberal candidates Terry Lake and Kevin Krueger have sometimes been like the infamous Hanson Brothers of the old Slap Shot movie as they crosscheck their hapless NDP opponents.

When people get bored with elections, it’s usually because they’re too tame. When candidates or parties stumble or when they get really mad at each other, it becomes more interesting.

More than a few have stumbled in this campaign. For the first half, it was the NDP taking the hits. Of late, it’s been the Liberals, but they are either so polished or so arrogant that mishaps slide off them like water from a duck.

Take the issue of blatant political favouritism on the part of Thompson Rivers University’s two top leaders. President Kathleen Scherf and Board of Governors chair Ron Olynyk are both shamelessly in the Liberal camp, and getting away with it.

One would think they should, at all costs, avoid partisan politics but such is not the case. Should we not be able to expect those who run one of our most important public institutions to stay above the fray?

Obviously not. I was surprised to see Olynyk at the Gordon Campbell rally in Terry Lake’s campaign headquarters a couple of weeks ago, and learned only later that he’s actually intimately involved in the campaign.

I was even more surprised to see Scherf there. She brushes it off as simply accepting an invitation to a public event, and claims she’d show up at an NDP rally, too, if invited. That I would like to see.

Olynyk, for his part, says maybe political involvement by the likes of himself will be reviewed in future.

That would be nice, since NDP candidate Tom Friedman — a TRU prof — was chastised after one of his workers used a campus email list to campaign for him. Mind you, Friedman thinks that caper was perfectly OK, too.

Look, everyone knows TRU board members are appointed based on their support for the party in power, and the president is appointed by that board, so it’s hardly a non-political body. But, during an election, could they at least try?

After a solid start in which they blew the NDP camp out of the water on a day when both party leaders came to town, Krueger and Lake have taken some much-deserved heat for refusing to attend forums at which they think the New Democrats will be favoured.

Friedman, running against Krueger, made an interesting point Monday when he wondered why Lake and Krueger regard educators as a special interest group but not business people — they refused to attend a forum put on by the former, but were there with bells on for the latter, a much friendlier crowd.

Of course, local goings on pale by comparison to other ridings in the province. We haven’t had any local candidates grabbing breasts or having their pictures taken in their underwear, or running ads asking to be re-elected when they’ve never been elected in the first place, or insulting First Nations.

Speaking of Bill Bennett, he seems to be incapable of staying out of trouble. The incumbent MLA from the Kootenays is knee-deep in it for running an ad saying voters “want someone who pays taxes and is concerned about how that money is being spent.”

First Nations leaders think it’s a swipe at natives and are demanding an apology from the premier, which isn’t likely to happen. Bennett, who assigns the controversy to NDP dirty tricks, has been in trouble before.

Most notably, he embarrassed himself a few years ago with a foul-language email to the local rod and gun club president calling him “an American spy” among other things.

Such things tend to be a distraction from the valuable insights we get from the diverging policy positions articulated by candidates. For example, we learned from Thursday night’s debate that Krueger is “fast and loose with the truth” (in Friedman’s view), that NDP candidate Doug Brown “misled” the public (in Lake’s opinion), that Krueger is a government “toadie” (according to Friedman), and that some of Brown’s campaign workers are “Jack Layton employees” with Toronto cellphone numbers (says Krueger).

Krueger, a political brawler with 14 years of back-alley Legislature street fighting under his belt, is a joy to watch at these things. Post-forum pundits seem to think he was the winner Thursday.

As marginal as such gems might seem, the forum was more than entertainment. For example, Lake let it be known that he doesn’t support education minister Shirley Bond’s dumb idea to force school boards into charging students for busing.

“When I get to Victoria I’m gonna make sure that no charge for school busing happens,” he declared.

Which means either that Bond is already under orders from Campbell to get rid of the problem she created, or that Bond-Campbell are charging ahead with it and Lake, if elected, can say he did his best.

Lake, by the way, was also questioned about some comments he made about the “silver tsunami” in a column in March of last year. Among the comments in that column that didn’t go over well: “Will we need a separate scooter lane next to the bicycle lane? Will we need to ban the wearing of club colours to head off the inevitable rumble in the parking lot of Denny’s just before the 4 p.m. dinner special?”

Lake apologized a week later, but not long after that he stopped writing columns for this paper.

One final note on this election. If you tune into TV7 on Tuesday night for its usual in-depth local polling results, you’ll be watching The Biggest Loser instead. Contractual obligations to air the reality show have pre-empted the station’s normal election coverage.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

http://www.armchairmayor.com

Politics suddenly a contact sport

Written for publication in The Kamloops Daily News on Friday morning, May 8, 2009

Politics became a contact sport in Kamloops Thursday night.

As the media-sponsored provincial election forum ground its way through a raucous night of shouts, accusations, and jostling for political points — and that was the audience — things got a bit testy at times.

Maybe it was the rainy night, maybe it was the 2-1 loss by the Canucks to Chicago, maybe everybody is just tired and cranky as the campaign draws to an end.

Whatever it was, the mood of the evening was summed up when Doug Brown, carrying the flag for the NDP in Kamloops-North Thompson, was interrupted during an exchange on the carbon tax by Liberal candidate Terry Lake.

A frustrated Brown raised his hand and started tapping Lake on the shoulder, demanding that Lake be quiet while Brown had the mike.

Yes, folks, he made contact, not once, not twice but three times, by my count — a definite no-no.

“Don’t touch him!” warned a supporter near the front row. “You can’t touch him! He touched him!” she said in disbelief.

But Lake, who labours under a reputation as a politician with a temper, kept his cool, ignoring Brown’s transgression, not even brushing the wrinkles out of his sports coat, though he did waggle a finger in return.

Despite this brief role reversal, Brown scored some points as most improved debater. His performance in the TRU Grand Hall was night and day from his stiffness during Monday’s chamber of commerce forum in the smaller Executive Inn venue.

It was as if he felt freed by the more lenient rules of the media format, more at home with the thrust and parry than having to stick to straight-ahead answers.

When it was Lake’s turn, he acquitted himself well — while he’s known for having a low boiling point, he’s also acknowledged as having a firm schooling on issues.

Meanwhile, down at the Kamloops-South Thompson end of the table, incumbent Liberal Kevin Krueger and NDP challenger Tom Friedman squared off with allegations of untruth and incompetence.

Friedman’s rope trick was effective, but Krueger’s “give a man enough rope” zinger topped it.

Krueger, who scored the most questions, momentarily forgot he was at a candidates’ forum and instead thought he was back in the Legislature, gleefully taking on some hecklers in the front row, calling them “Jack Layton employees” with Toronto cell phone numbers. “Look at them hootin’ and hollererin’!” he taunted.

The Krueger-Friedman and Lake-Brown matches dominated the card, with the third-party candidates gamely using the new challenge system (each candidate was allowed to use five challenges to rebut another) in order to get time at the microphones.

Best performance there goes to Maria Dobi of the Conservatives, with the Greens’ April Snowe a close second. Her closing line alone merits some admiration for its fiestiness: “It’s not necessary,” she pronounced, “to vote for a party whose leader is a drunk driver, and it is not necessary to vote for a party that changes its policies more often than I change my hair colour.”

Snowe, as it happens, is a blonde, at least for now.

Who “won” depends on which party or candidate you favour, but most attendees appeared to appreciate the new format, which allowed for more one-on-one debate while still assuring time for plenty of questions.

After what many have called a terminally boring campaign, it was just what the doctor ordered for a new lease on life.

The fruits and veggies theory of STV

Sorry I didn’t get this posted promptly, but for those who may not have read it in last Saturday’s Daily News, or seen it on the KDN website, here’s my regular column from May 2. See you at the forum tonight, 7 p.m. TRU Grand Hall.

In 2005, I voted against BC-STV because I didn’t understand it.

In 2009, I will vote against BC-STV because I understand it.

During the past several months I’ve tried to keep an open mind on the matter, because it’s a major decision and I genuinely wanted to give it a fair chance.

So I’ve talked on numerous occasions both with supporters and non-supporters. I’m impressed with the passion and the good intentions of both sides.

People say the single transferable vote system for electing MLAs is hard to understand, that they’re being asked to take a leap of faith that it will work. Well, once you get into it a bit, it really isn’t all that difficult.

STV supporters admit they can’t explain it through their advertising campaign and they have to stick to key messages like kinder, more friendly government. On their websites, though, they use various comparisons to make it easier — like spending spare change, or putting votes in various containers, or (my favourite) buying fruits and vegetables.

It’s the fruits and veggies analogy that finally made the coin drop for me. By taking the somewhat mind-numbing explanations of the science and formulas behind STV, and translating them into a shopping trip to the super market, I now get it.

Suppose the province of B.C. is a big shopping centre. And the new STV riding of Cariboo-Thompson is the super market. The fresh produce section is the polling station.

Think of it this way. You go looking for the fresh produce section, but you discover that, instead of all the produce being together in once corner of store, it’s scattered all over the place and you have to go looking for it in several different isles.

This is called the STV method of shopping.

However, even though it’s harder to find what you’re looking for, the store management assures you it’s necessary in order to offer you a greater selection — you are allowed to pick out five fruits and/or veggies instead of just one.

You like the looks of the nice ripe tomatoes, so you take one of those.

It being in season, you add a slice of watermelon. Next, a potato, a strawberry and a banana.

However, the shopper next to you wants a somewhat different selection. He likes the tomatoes and he might settle on the watermelon, but he’d rather have an apple, a piece of broccoli and a carrot than a potato, strawberry and banana.

Therefore, you cut a slice off your tomato and trade him for a bite out of his apple. He still has his eye on that watermelon, so you break it in two and reluctantly offer it to him. This leaves you a bit short of what you actually wanted, but he generously snaps a piece off his carrot and hands it to you.

In return for this act of generosity, you peel your banana and chop off a couple of chunks for him. You aren’t crazy for broccoli so you agree to toss the broccoli altogether and split a lemon. This is what they call the single transferable fruit.

In order to calculate whether this exchange is completely fair, you truck over to the scale and weigh each piece. You must include the leftover strawberry and the potato in this tally.

But you aren’t done yet. Now, you add up the number of species of fruits and veggies and divide them by the number of portions — this is called the droop veggie quota.

By this time, of course, the banana is getting mushy and the tomato and watermelon are dripping onto the floor. But at least you both got some of what you wanted, so you put it all in the cart and ring it through at the checkout counter.

At home, you shove the various pieces of banana, apple, lemon, etc. into a blender and mix for 30 seconds. This is what we call the legislature.

What you are left with is a gooey mess that has no logical use, so you take the blender out into the back yard and dump it.

After the dogs, cats and pigeons eat it, what comes out the other end is called STV.

I hope this explanation has provided you with a clearer understanding of how STV can work for you. With this in mind, you can now make your decision when you go into the voting booth May 12.

As for me, Thursday night’s debate hosted by the chamber of commerce, and the columns from both sides we’ve been publishing for the past few weeks, have convinced me I’d rather stick with a nice, unambiguous hot pepper than blender goo.

Good luck with your shopping.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

http://www.armchairmayor.wordpress.com

Elections forums good way to judge candidates

Election forums are as much about forming gut feelings about candidates as they are for getting information on how they stand on specific policy matters. Last night’s chamber of commerce forum was the first chance I’ve had to see all the candidates in one room.

The chamber forums are tightly controlled and designed to avoid any impoliteness either from candidates or the audience. I sat on the question-vetting committee, which is the second time I’ve done so at a chamber forum, and it gives y0u a good idea of what people are thinking about.

I spent quite a bit of time studying the manner of the candidates, though, and left with some definite impressions. The most polished were the old political warhorses, Kevin Krueger and Terry Lake, but Tom Friedman — the NDP candidate running against Krueger — is very articulate.

Most disappointing is Doug Brown. Despite the fact he’s run previously both at the municipal and provincial levels, the microphone is not his friend. He tends to be stiff and uncomfortable, relying on written notes whenever he can.

April Snowe, the young Green running in Kamloops-North Thompson, is pleasingly well-spoken, while her counterpart in Kamloops-South Thompson, Bev Markle, comes across as a little nervous and intense.

Keston Broughton, the Work Less Party candidate, showed up late wearing a bathrobe, and I’m not at all sure what message he was trying to get across with that. Every election seems to have a class clown, and this time it’s Broughton, who’s engaging in a way but has no business running.

Wayne Russell of the B.C. Refederation Party, is good for an occasional chuckle but not even remotely a serious candidate. Before this election, who’d ever heard of his party, or Broughton’s?

When asked if he thought water is a human right, Russell didn’t get it. He answered in the affirmative offered no comment — clearly he isn’t tuned in to the real debate about whether water is a right or a commodity.

Lake showed a brief flash of his celebrated temper when the NDP crowd at the front of the room started lobbing a few verbal stones at him during his answers. He grumbled about getting no respect, to which one non-supporter suggested it was something he, too, should demonstrate.

Lake treads a fine line between feistiness and looking thin-skinned, and if he keeps grousing about the way he’s treated at forums he’s going to look more like the latter than the former.

Based on last night’s forum, there’s a lot more interest in this campaign than the pundits are suggesting, and Thursday night’s media forum (Daily News, TV7, Kamloops This Week, with TRU) at TRU’s Grand Hall is going to be very lively, indeed. Moderator Bill O’Donovan could have his hands full.

It gets start at 7 p.m.

Is The Daily News biased toward STV?

It was a sincere question. Is The Daily News biased against STV?

“If so, I think you owe it to your readers to say so.”

That was what a reader had to say after reading our coverage of the Chamber of Commerce-Daily News forum on the single transferable vote. The basis of the comment was that she felt the story gave more space to No-STV president Bill Tieleman than it did to the Yes side represented by Nick Loenen.

I didn’t think the story was biased but I never take anything for granted so I pulled out my ruler and measured up the amount of space given to each speaker. They came out pretty much dead even except for a couple of paragraphs in which audience members clearly opposed STV.

That, no doubt, tipped the scales in that reader’s perception of bias. I can tell you there was no intention to portray bias. While editorials and columns are all about bias, I still believe news stories should be neutral.

Reporters have personal opinions like everybody else, but they are capable of setting aside their own bias in the way they tell their stories in print. I have no idea what the majority view would be in our own newsroom, but I know some of our staff are passionate Yes supporters, and others think it’s the dumbest thing ever.

As for myself, I don’t like STV, but I waited until the forum was over before commenting on it, as I didn’t think it would be fair for the forum moderator to come down on one side or the other before the two sides had their say.

And, if I do say so myself, I think the forum — which was well attended — provided an excellent opportunity for the public to understand the arguments for and against. Unfortunately, most other  voters will got the polling stations still having to guess whether STV is a good idea.