Frootloops City council tackles the security issue

Armchair Mayor column, The Kamloops Daily News, June 26, 2010

FROOTLOOPS City council sits down for its last meeting before breaking for the summer. They’re antsy to head off to the beach, as long as the tubers don’t get in the way.

MAYOR PETER MILKBAR: The summer solstice has come and gone and, yet, here we sit. Let’s get this over with — don’t make me use the ‘B’ word.

RANDY DOODLE (City administrative guy): Your Cusswordship, you may want to deal with a letter we’ve just received from BCIS, the BS Intelligence Service. It’s very short.

MILKBAR: Go for it.

DOODLE: It’s from Dick Fiddle, the director. It goes like this. . . “Are you now, or have you ever been, under the influence of a foreign power?”

COUN. TINA TOAST: OK, OK, I confess! I had one too many ganbeis the last time we had dinner with our friends from China. But, believe me, it wasn’t as if it was fun — you could clean graffiti off mailboxes with that stuff they drink.

DOODLE: I don’t think that’s the kind of influence Mr. Fiddle is talking about, Your Nasalness. He means political influence. He’d like to know if you’ve ever made a decision based on a relationship with a foreign power.

MILKBAR: That’s a toughie. John Ranter, the mayor of Trash Creek, took me to lunch once. He let me pick the restaurant. Does that count?

COUN. JOHN DECAPPACINNO: Your Drollness, people come into the shop, they say, “John, is it true you’re under the influence?” I say, not when I’m working. They say, “John, is it true Mahmoud Ahmadini-whoever is running City Hall now?” I say, I dunno, I’ll find out.

COUN. JOHN O’HECK: I’d be happy to send off a text message to Mr. Fiddle thanking him very much for his interest, but that we’ll be busy visiting our sister cities in North Korea and Kyrgyzstan this summer and we’ll have to get back to him later.

COUN. DENIS WATCHDOG: Your Warship, I’m actually more concerned about a rumour that the ACC — Acrimonious Cogeneration Corp. — is going to burn nuclear waste in downtown Frootloops and that we’re all gonna die. I think we should object to that.

COUN. NANCY BUBBLES: I’m in full agreement with Coun. Watchdog, Your Mumbleship. I move that we send a strongly worded letter to the Ministry of Air, Land and Fuzzy Things opposing ACC’s new plant.

MAYOR MILKBAR: Defeated.

COUN. BUBBLES: But we haven’t voted yet.

MILKBAR: No need. Your motions never get passed.

COUN. MADGE SPIRULINA: I move that we send a strongly worded letter to the Ministry of Air, Land and Fuzzy Things opposing ACC’s new plant.

MILKBAR: The motion is carried.

COUN. WATCHDOG: Your Washtub, point of order. That’s the same motion Coun. Bubbles just made.

MILKBAR: I know, but Coun. Spirulina is incredibly sincere and gives out hugs. What’s next on the agenda?

SALLY NUMBERS (Chief Bean Counter): We’ve been studying the impact of the Hated Sales Tax on the average Frootloopsian, Your Warthog, and we can give you a brief report. Terry Terrier and Kevin Bluster were too busy avoiding impeachment and planning their recall campaigns to meet with us, but here’s the way we see it. The HST is a revenue-neutral tax grab that will take money out of the hands of the poor and transfer it to the rich, however an offsetting decaffeinated beverage allowance applied to the negative infiltration of carbon-fuel initiatives will result in significant improvements to our fiscal performance that will translate into a whole bunch of happy campers within a clearly delineated timetable.

MILKBAR: What does that mean?

NUMBERS: It means nobody has a clue, Your Grumbleship.

COUN. PAT WARHORSE: I’m concerned, Your Whizkid, how we’re supposed to get to all the junkets and conventions this summer now that CheapJet has cancelled its service, again.

BYRON McSNORKLE (Fun and Games Guy): Your Whippersnapper, we’ve been working on that. Instead of traveling to other places, we’re going to take you all up to the McTournament Capital Centre for a retreat. The feds have a fake lake they’ll be putting on the market very soon and we’re pretty sure we can get a good deal on it. It’ll fit nicely on the football field. We can sit around and roast marshmallows.

JIM HYDRANT: I would support the idea, Your Wombat, as long as we bring our own marshmallows. The last thing we want is any commercial activity in our parks and facilities.

McSNORKLE: No problem. Our new master plan strictly prohibits any activity that would make us or anyone else money.

MILKBAR: OK, let’s wrap this up. I’ve just been informed by our bylaws guy the beach has been cleared of all tubers and Abby the golden retriever but before we head down to the park for a swim, we’re supposed to be at a ceremony demolishing another heritage building. I don’t like to miss those.

COUN. BUBBLES: But, Your Honcho, we haven’t made any decisions yet!

MILKBAR: What’s your point? Meeting adjourned.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

http://www.armchairmayor.wordpress.com

Does Terry Lake have a political death wish?

To the casual observer, it might seem that Terry Lake is a) actively engaged in political suicide, or b) preparing to vacate the B.C. Liberal party, which would bring him back to a).

Suicide brings on many changes, especially political suicide, and I don’t think he’s quite ready for that — he’s too ambitious.

Yet, on the face of it, it might appear that way. First there was his gaffe a couple of weeks ago when he suggested the anti-HST petition might be rejected as invalid. Then he started this week by speculating the HST might be lowered after awhile, sometime in the second half of 2012. That prompted NDP House Leader Mike Farnworth to characterize it as indicative of panic in the Liberal backbenches.

“I am not surprised that you’re getting some people saying one thing and others saying another thing because, quite frankly, they’re looking at an electoral disaster and they know it. I think it reflects the disarray in the Liberal party,” he said.

Premier Gordon Campbell wouldn’t confirm Lake’s speculation on lowering the hated tax. In fact, he said the HST could actually go up.

Wednesday, the Globe and Mail quoted Campbell further on that possibility. “If Terry is saying there’s a choice, he’s right,” said Campbell. “There will be choices. You could choose to raise it and dramatically reduce income taxes. You could choose to reduce it. Those are choices any government will face.”

And Finance Minister Colin Hanse said cutting the HST by even one percentage point would take $750 million out of revenues that would have to be covered some other way.

So what is Lake, once touted as a surefire bet for a cabinet job within his first term, up to? I dunno.

Oliver — song for a disaster zone

The mind is a strange thing. It can forget where my car keys are in the morning, and remember the most inconsequential things in the evening.

Take tonight, for example. I was driving home from work, listening to the 7 p.m. news on CBC. The station was reporting an update on the terrible mud slide in Oliver.

I was born in Oliver, and grew up there. It’s a wonderful little town, and I’ve been thinking about it since the news of the slide came out last weekend. I found myself humming, then singing, the school song for what is now South Okanagan secondary school, which was South Okanagan high school when I graduated in 1962.

Without fumbling a single word, I sang the song I thought I’d long forgotten….

Throughout the years, may this our song,

Bring memories of happy days of old.

Loud be the cheers, sung loud and long,

That echo through where’er our flag unfolds.

For we are the students of the finest school, the best school in the land,

Where brave deeds together with the golden rule, go always hand in hand.

So stand up and cheer for our comrades dear, our victory flag must fly,

One, two, three, rah rah rah, who are we, rah rah rah

We’re the S.O. High!

From what recess of the brain that comes from, I have no idea. But if I ever run into an old schoolmate from the S.O. High I’ll be able to impress them.

McLeod stick-handles through another one

News that our Members of Parliament have abandoned ship on their attempts to stop Auditor-General Sheila Fraser from looking at their expenses isn’t as surprising as the convoluted reasoning of Conservative house leader Jay Hill. He puts it all down to a campaign of “misinformation.”

What misinformation. All Canadians wanted was transparency in government, specifically in how Members of Parliament spend our money on themselves and on the operation of Parliament.

MP Cathy McLeod, who initially figured there was no good reason for the AG’s involvement, now says our Parliamentarians listened to their constituents. While trying to stay on side with the Conservative party line on this one, she had the good sense to publish a brief summary of her own expenses on her website some time back.

That summary, produced for all MPs by KPMG, doesn’t get at the details of spending the way the AG no doubt will.

McLeod has stick-handled her way through some difficult stuff in her short time as MP — including the fake cheque controversy, the ACC funding battle, and now this. That, people, is the sign of a good politician. Maybe she could give a clinic to the Liberals on how to extricate themselves from the HST.

Film commission’s 10th anniversary party

I dropped into the 10th anniversary party held by the Thompson Nicola Regional Film Commission on Friday evening in the Panorama Room at TRU. After having been off the commission for a few years, it was good to see quite a number of the people I used to work with.

Well do I remember when the commission started up; directing taxpayers’ money toward an effort to bring movie productions here wasn’t an easy sell, but the TNRD board got behind it and, a decade later, it’s still going strong.

Well, not as strong as past years. It’s unfortunate that the 10th had to be celebrated at a time when the industry is in tough shape in B.C. No major new productions are on the horizon — no Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, Jennifer Lopez, Morgan Freeman, Martin Sheen.

But you’d never know it by bows that were being taken Friday night. Nothing wrong with that. Vicci Weller has done a tremendous job in heading up the commission, and it was nice to see movie producer Danny Virtue recognized for staying on the board for the duration, despite the fact he lives at the coast and has to travel up here on his own dime when he’s able to make it to board meetings.

And the little video production that reviewed some of the highlights of the commission’s work was a hoot, though some who should have been acknowledged  were left out. But, that’s always the way — it’s hard to cover everybody.

ACC — one city’s loss could be another’s gain

Armchair Mayor column for The Kamloops Daily News, Saturday, June 12, 2010

Maybe the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. story will have a happy ending.

As reported in this newspaper earlier in the week, a group of Prince George business people are wooing the company Kamloops didn’t want. After this city removed the welcome mat, ACC president Kim Sigurdson received a call.

The message: if Kamloops doesn’t want you, come on up to the friendly north country.

How serious are they, and Sigurdson, about the prospects of an ACC gasification plant in Prince? Very.

“I’m working hard with them,” Sigurdson told me. “Prince George is Number One on the list.”

Oh, are there others?

Well, yes. Terrace and the District of Mackenzie have called, as well.

It isn’t just about railway ties, Sigurdson said — his gasification technology is of interest to those who want to use “clean stock” like beetle wood or waste lumber, as well.

“Prince George is a great place to look at because of the pine-beetle-damaged wood and other fuel, and, of course, the railway ties. They’ve been talking to us about different locations.”

Will Prince George activists rally as they did in Kamloops?

In fact, Sigurdson was set to introduce his technology at the fourth annual International Bio-Energy Conference and Exhibition in Prince George this week, but he’s recovering from an illness and couldn’t make it. Billed as the biggest bio-energy conference in Canada, it attracts speakers from all over the world.

A small detail would have to be worked out — Sigurdson’s contract for sourcing railway ties is with CP Rail, which doesn’t run through Prince George. He doesn’t see that as a problem, though he wouldn’t go on the record about prospects for doing a deal with CN or B.C. Rail, or whether shipping CP Rail ties north would be viable.

What, I asked him, would he do differently this time? “The process that we went through (in Kamloops) was a comedy of errors and I can take a lot of the blame for that,” he said. “If I was to do it all over again, I wouldn’t dismiss a small group of people. People around me said ‘don’t worry about it’ and I should have worried about it.”

This time, he says, “I would be up there making myself available to the public. I’m not going to make the same mistakes twice.”

Sigurdson expects some pushback from the public in Prince George, though it’s hard to say whether it will be anything like what happened in Kamloops. If anyone has a feel for public opinion in Prince, it’s radio talk jock and blogger Ben Meisner, one of the better known voices in the province.

As soon as he read The Daily News story reprinted in The Prince George Citizen, Meisner wrote a commentary for his Opinion 250 blog questioning the authority of the Prince George Downtown Business Improvement Association to speak for the community on the issue, and immediately got a few comments similar to the old creosote paranoia we went through here.

“There has to be some waste product from the process, and I’ll bet it is concentrated and toxic,” wrote one. “If (BIA president) Hughy Nicholson will volunteer to unload a flat car load of creosoted railroad ties with his bare hands, I will endorse his request,” wrote another. “If not, forget his idea.”

But Meisner says he isn’t necessarily against ACC, and figures the overall reaction in P.G. would be quite different from Kamloops.

“It may be a really nice fit,” he told me. “It will be looked at; it won’t be one of those things where ‘we’ve got to kill it and get it out.’ They’ll get a good reception.

“No question about it, they’ll be given a fair hearing.”

His shots at the BIA have to do both with recently elected BIA president Nicholson — publisher of the Citizen and frequent subject of Meisner’s blogs — and with what he sees as a sort of boosterism that could backfire. Declaring that P.G. wants the project this early in the game does ACC no favours, he says.

Meanwhile, all seems in order for September’s Environmental Appeal Board hearing of ACC’s permit in Kamloops, but the big question is whether Ruth Madsen will meet her August deadline for filing the thousands of pages of argument she says she’ll be putting before the board.

With ACC clearly out of the Kamloops picture, is there really much value in pursuing the appeal? Will the fight be carried to P.G.? Interesting to note Madsen’s involvement in the Fraser Basin Council, a supposedly neutral organization that has taken a sudden interest in what’s going on with ACC in Prince George.

BY THE WAY: Both Meisner and our own Claude Richmond are recent appointments to the Law Society of B.C. governing board. When I asked Meisner if he had an honorary university doctorate to match Richmond’s he said no, but he did turn down an Order of B.C. .

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

http://www.armchairmayor.wordpress.com

Rehabilitating Klatsassin through art and myth

Review for The Kamloops Daily News, Friday, June 11, 2010

Stan Douglas recalls that, when he released his exhibit Klatsassin, he wasn’t a popular man among the Chilcotin people, who were suspicious of his intent. Later, he said, they seemed alright with it.

Little wonder. Once they got a look, they probably walked away shaking their heads. I suspect Douglas wants everybody to do that.

Four years later, his photos-and-film exhibit has made its way to Kamloops, opening this week at the art gallery. Anybody who would produce a 69-hour movie very likely doesn’t want us to “get it.”

Stan Douglas.

 

Who, after all, would waste that much time trying to figure out what goes on inside an artist’s head, though one reviewer professes to know, concluding that “. . . for all its technical sophistication and labyrinthine complexity, Klatsassin exploits a relatively simple binary opposition: a poetic tension between the repetitive precision of cinematic time and the fluidity of subjective experience.”

Excuse me?

I’m with the Chilcotin — I don’t get it either. Just as well, perhaps.

Chilcotin leaders are very protective of anything to do with Klatsassin, or Klatassine, a war chief who led a band of thugs on a rampage of murder and plunder in 1864, and was hunted down and hanged.

They worry that any new history or treatment will challenge the myth of the convenient hero figure who supposedly tried to protect his people’s land against invasion.

What actually happened was that Klatsassin/Klatassine talked a group of Chilcotins into hacking a white roadbuilding crew to death as they slept so they could steal their stuff. They committed several other murders along the way, including that of my great-great-grandfather, whom they shot in the back.

At the time, it was known as the Bute Inlet Massacre (a more apt description) but let’s stick with The Chilcotin War, which is what I used as the title of a book I wrote about it back in 1978.

Not until after he murdered his first unarmed white man did Klatassine start talking about territory and war (murder is such a nasty word, war is so much better). As many criminals do, he was smart enough to try to justify his actions with spin.

And, by the way, neither Alexis, the much respected chief of all the Chilcotin, nor the less admirable Chief Anahim, backed Klatassine — indeed, they co-operated with the colonial expedition that caught him.

The art gallery, in its promotional material, claims Douglas “defies the official version of events.” Translation: let’s not be overly concerned with the facts.

This “war,” far from being a “little-known event in B.C.’s history” as some artistic types like to claim, is one of the most highly documented episodes of that time. Official reports, journals, contemporary interviews, ledgers, testimony and, of course, newspaper stories abound, providing a pretty clear picture of what took place.

Despite this, the romanticization of Klatassine has been so successful that, in 1999, the provincial government officially apologized for hanging him and his fellow cutthroats. It’s curious to me that non-native society feels compelled to apologize not only for the many wrongs done to our First Nations peoples but also for an event in which innocent Europeans were slaughtered.

I can empathize with Douglas in one sense — when I published The Chilcotin War, I wasn’t exactly Mr. Popular with the Chilcotin folks, either. What they have difficulty understanding is that Klatassine’s depredations against whites make him as much the historic property of non-natives as of the Chilcotin.

If Douglas provides enough incentive to learn more about the Chilcotin War, he’ll have done a service. So when you give up trying to figure out what Douglas is talking about, pick up a copy of Rich Mole’s recent book and find something out about what really took place.

I was prepared not to like this book (it’s published by Heritage House and sells for $9.95) because, for one thing, Mole uses the same title I did, albeit with subtext “A Tale of Death and Reprisal.”

I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying it. This is a thin volume at just 140 pages, but it lays out the core facts of the situation very well and actually adds a lot of good stuff about the key players. I found myself learning new things from it, and, to me, that’s what makes a revisit of a by-now well-mined event valuable.

He accurately portrays colonial society and the project led by entrepreneur Alfred Waddington to build a new route to the Barkerville goldfields up Bute Inlet and across the Chilcotin Plateau.

Mole points out that, far from objecting to the presence of whites in their territory, the Chilcotin were generally accepting of the traders who took up residence there, and were even employed by Waddington’s road crew.

While much is made of alleged trickery in getting Klatassine to surrender to expedition leader William George Cox, Mole explains that as winter approached Klatassine and his band on the run were facing starvation and had no choice.

Further evidence of the inability of normal people to fathom Douglas’ message is the fact that reviews of his work all seem to borrow from each other for convenience, echoing near-identical lines about “recombinance” and comparisons to Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon. It’s all so artsy-fartsy.

Looking at Douglas’ version of the Klatassine story is a little like staring at a painting of a stripe and trying to fathom its deep inner meaning. Reading Mole’s book is like looking at a painting of a stripe and saying, “Yup, that’s a stripe.”

Take your pick.

mrothenburger@kamloopsnews.ca

The worst driver’s licence photo ever

The man in the photo stares at the camera as if he’s just aspirated his dinner into his lungs. He looks old, perhaps beyond his years, every line and crevice clearly outlined, and a definite, unflattering indication of jowls.

A gradually receding hairline seems more pronounced than it should be. The fact the picture is black and white rather than colour probably doesn’t help.

At a guess, I’d say the guy is about 105 years old and having a very bad day. 

It is, however, me, on my new driver’s licence.

The licence itself is quite attractive, with a new design and new colours. It’s the picture that’s positively frightening. If I were to be stopped at a roadblock, and the cop judged my degree of inebriation based on the picture on my licence, he’d impound my vehicle then and there and send me smartly off to the drunk tank.

“No glasses,” the beefy and quite friendly fellow at Front Counter B.C. told me as I positioned myself on the correct spot, and he focused his camera.

I figured I’d put a good face on it, lifting my chin a little, opening my eyes wide so as not to look like some kind of a crook, making sure not to blink. I did not smile — I’m not sure if it’s a myth that you can’t smile for your driver’s licence, but I took no chances. I probably should have.

This is possibly the very worst in a long line of driver’s licence pictures. I’m pretty sure the guy who took it was required to undergo extensive training in how to take bad pictures. They probably have an annual convention and give out plaques for “Worst Overall Driver’s Licence Photo,” “Worst Driver’s Licence Photo Taken During Noon Hour,” and “Worst Photo Ever of a Newspaper Editor.”

Mine will no doubt be nominated in several categories.

And don’t get me started on passport photos, in which everyone looks like a terrorist. Speaking of photos, what’s up with people who have their pictures taken leaning to one side or another? Is that supposed to make them look like they’re moving, or in the process of falling down?

ACC may be heading to friendly Prince George

 

ACC may be heading for the friendly north.

 

A visit from one of our sister newspapers yielded some interesting information yesterday.

Hugh Nicholson, who publishes the Prince George Citizen, stopped in to say hello on his way home after a short break, and mentioned to me that his city took note of the fact Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. was made unwelcome here. In addition to serving as publisher at the paper, Nicholson is president of the downtown business association in Prince George.

That association is keenly interested in getting the bio-energy project Kamloops ran out of town. “If Kamloops doesn’t want you we’ll take you in Prince George,” was the message given to ACC president Kim Sigurdson, as quoted from an interview a little later in the day with Daily News reporter Cam Fortems.

Indeed, a group of business folks have held a conference call with Sigurdson about the possibility of ACC landing there, though Sigurdson was characteristically reluctant to talk about it yesterday. Prince George, as I learned when I attended a bio-energy conference there a few months ago, is seriously into alternative energy sources.

Our northern neighbour understands the potential for green and clean economic development via bio-energy, and appears undeterred by the controversy here in which mass fear was manufactured out of thin air against ACC’s gasification project.

That’s in keeping with the situation as I understand it in Europe, where communities compete for such projects as job creators and solutions to waste disposal.

In the end, it would seem, our loss may very well be P.G.’s gain.

Spinmeisters in government? I’m shocked

Several times a day, my email in-basket goes ringy-ding with messages from “PMO-CPM.”

That’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s flack office. It’s been happening for several months, and I’ve never once used one of these publicity advisories for anything, and I can’t imagine any other newspaper has, either. 

Today, for example, came an announcement “for immediate release” that the PM would be meeting with Abdou Diouf, Secretary-General of La Francophonie, and Kamalesh Sharma, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, in his office. Be there no later than 3:15 p.m. and gather in the Foyer of the House of Commons with proper accreditation.

Mind you, if you were a journalist and figured there might be a story in that, well never mind, because this was a “photo opportunity only (cameras and photographers only).” In other words, no questions allowed; nothing but hand shakes and smiling faces.

Almost all of these advisories are for photo opps, and the only thing I’ve learned from them is that the PM frequently takes a break from slagging the Liberals to have his picture taken.

The reason for this sudden onslaught of information about photo opps with Harper becomes clear in view of the three-part series currently running in The Daily News (Part 3 runs Wednesday) on spin control in the PMO. Canadian Press reporters Mike Blanchfield and Jim Bronskill got their hands on a mess of material via a Freedom of Information application that shows the extent to which the PMO tries to control the message, muzzling anyone who is off cue.

“The first casualty of war is the truth,” someone reminded me today after reading Part 2 on how the PMO has stage-managed the rationale for keeping our troops in Afghanistan. Well, that’s probably a little strong, because spin-doctoring often is about burying bad news by over-blowing good news, not necessarily blatant lying.

But there’s no question no previous prime minister has been so fixated on controlling what we know about his government.