Sorry, Clark doesn’t ‘deserve’ to be handed a free seat

I’m not one of those who gets all sentimental about Christy Clark “deserving” a seat in the B.C. Legislature.

Clark announced Wednesday she will run in a by-election in Westside-Kelowna, and some people think the other parties should step aside and let her win by acclamation.

Such a grand gesture would save the taxpayers some money but, democratically speaking, it would be foolish.

According to Todd Stone, the decision of Liberal Ben Stewart to resign the seat he just handily won, in order to give Clark a safe shot at election, is the “honorable thing” to do.

Any of the Liberals elected May 14 would do the same thing, he said.

Well, not quite. Ralph Sultan, who won re-election in West Vancouver-Capilano by the biggest margin of any Liberal, was quoted by CBC shortly after election night that he would not voluntarily give up his seat for Clark. It will be interesting to see if Sultan’s name comes up on the list of cabinet ministers that will be announced Friday.

Westside-Kelowna is a strange choice for Clark. She’s from the Coast, after all.

According to Clark, though, Kelowna is her “natural political home.” Apparently, she’s had an epiphany after all these years. Clark, who lives in Vancouver-Fairview, lost in Vancouver-Point Grey. She is a Lower Mainlander through and through, but suddenly her political heart is in the Interior.

Oh, well, Adrian Dix has decided to put up a candidate and fight the good fight in the by-election, and the Liberals will, no doubt, complain about it. For Dix, though, it’s a no-brainer — he’ll get to fight the general election all over again, at least in miniature, and try to avoid the total screw-up he committed in May.

This being a democracy, the people should have a say, and she should have to earn her seat.

Clark will win, of course, because she’s the premier and because the Liberals won Westside-Kelowna by 28 points and nothing’s going to change that. Of course, that’s pretty much what the New Democrats thought about the general election they just blew.

Council newbies, please spare us sad stories about your hard work

Shed a tear for the poor City councillor. Apparently, it’s a tough job.

In a column in The Daily News, Coun. Ken Christian laments the hard life of the councillor, filled with meetings, reading, public events and travel.

Coun. Ken Christian

He and other councillors across the country returned home this week from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities convention in Vancouver. Coquitlam mayor Richard Stewart and some of his councillors were criticized by fellow councillor Lou Sekora for spending $225 a night — funded by taxpayers — at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel instead of commuting by car as he did.

Stewart, naturally, used the old “networking” defence to justify the expenditures. Municipal politicians were slaving away on our behalf from 7 a.m. to midnight at the convention, he says.

Mayors and councillors always feel defensive about conventions like the FCM. I see in today’s Daily News a headline, “Councillors say FCM worth the expense.” The story quotes Kamloops delegates talking about all the informative sessions they attended and, of course, the networking.

Marg Spina met Justin Trudeau in a lineup, Arjun Singh talked to some guy while jogging, and the mayor of Sudbury told Peter Milobar what a great place her city is, mine and all.

Look, conventions can be valuable. They are also a lot of fun, with great meals, nice receptions, some fine entertainment, and interesting tours. Councillors doth protest way too much with their assurances of all the work they’re getting done.

Fact is, the FCM does have some informative sessions, but it’s not nearly as valuable as the annual UBCM conference, for example, and way more expensive because of travel costs. The venue is often on the other side of the country.

FCM attendance should be limited to three members of council each year — that way, each councillor will have a chance to attend one FCM conference during his or her three-year term. Even the TNRD puts limits on attendance.

Back to Ken Christian for a minute. It seems like rookie councillors come to the conclusion after a year in office that they didn’t realize how much work it was going to be.

Christian’s column comes on the heels of a charge led by Nancy Bepple and Nelly Dever to review the pay rates for Kamloops City council. In the column, he talks about having to spend two to six hours reading the agenda before each weekly meeting, and about public hearings that can last up to five hours.

Well, studying the homework will typically take two hours. More than that is unusual. Public hearings can take up to five hours — once in a blue moon.

As for public events, councillors attend what they can, so some attend more than others. It’s not always a lot of fun, but sometimes it is.

Nobody said it was easy but the point is, being on council is not drudgery. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s an experience like no other. So please, newbies, spare us the sad stories about how much work you do.

Fired Ford chief of staff a former Kamloopsian with impressive background

Mark Towhey (left) and Mayor Rob Ford. (canada.com)

The Kamloops connection to the controversy surrounding Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has a sense of humour, a distinguished background in the Canadian Armed Forces and a long career in crisis management.

Mark Towhey was fired as Ford’s chief of staff Thursday after nine months on the job, telling media as he left city hall, “I am no longer the chief of staff. I did not resign.”

The reasons for the firing haven’t been made public, though some media are reporting that he was terminated after a disagreement with Ford arising out of the controversies the mayor has found himself in during the past week.

In the two days since his firing, Towhey has been getting praise from newspaper readers. He has not commented on the reasons for his firing, but he certainly has an impressive resume.

KamHigh lists Towhey as being a student there from 1980 to 1982, and he has referred to Kamloops as his “home town.”

A friend says that following high school, Towhey attended the University of Victoria, where he was elected to the alma mater society, then joined the Canadian Scottish as an infantry reserve officer and then the regular forces, serving in Germany, Africa and Golan as a UN peacekeeper, as well as several postings in Canada.

He left the forces and got an MBA at Western University’s Richard Ivey School of Business, then established a crisis management company, serving as consultant in Canada, the U.S., and internationally.

In 2010, he helped get Ford elected as mayor, and was appointed chief of staff last August. In a feature about Ford’s key staff in April 2011, when Towhey’s position was director of policy and strategic planning, the Globe and Mail described him as a “strategist” and wrote:

“An ever-present broker during council votes and debates, Mr. Towhey was a consultant specializing in crisis management for the likes of McCain Foods, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the federal Department of Defence prior to joining the Ford campaign.

“He worked on two failed federal campaigns for Conservative Jon Capobianco in Etobicoke-Lakeshore, the riding currently held by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, and once blogged in favour of selling the TTC to the private sector. In the mayor’s office, Mr. Towhey is the architect of incorporating the election platform of Rob Ford, the candidate, into the agenda of Rob Ford, the mayor.”

Friday, the Toronto Star wrote: “Appointed as Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s chief of staff last August and fired on Thursday, Towhey was arguably the most important — and some would say the smartest — person on the mayor’s team.

“Towhey was assigned to steer Ford in the right direction, find the right venues for Ford to appear at, identify media who could be sympathetic to him and plot strategy for the press secretary.”

Towhey’s sense of humour shows up in his tweeting from time to time. After a horde of television cameras and newspaper photographers recorded his departure from City Hall on Thursday afternoon as he got into his car and drove off, he tweeted, “Very happy now that I remembered to wash my car yesterday.”

Friday, in an apparent reference to a controversy over Ford sticking “Rob Ford Mayor” fridge magnets on cars in a parking lot of a church, and in the context of the past week’s uproar, Towhey tweeted, “This week in review: all in all gotta be pretty happy with the way we buried the magnet story.”

Today, he tweeted, “From my upcoming LearningAnnex wrksp ‘How 2 get 1,000 Twitter Followers in 1 day’ Step 1 Help elect a big city mayor Step 2 buy fridge magnets…”

One of those new followers is yours truly.

Kamloops’ record as bellwether riding remains unblemished

Todd Stone and Terry Lake in celebration mode Tuesday night. (Daily News photo)

“Unbelievable,” June Phillips said as we passed in the throng at Tuesday night’s Stone-Lake celebration in Hotel 540.

Surely, I said, the woman who ran Kevin Krueger’s constituency office for years must have been confident of a Liberal return to government. She confessed her surprise at the outcome, though she said Krueger was sure of it.

Her response was typical in that room. The Liberals crowding around, laughing and shouting, might have thought Todd Stone was going to win Kamloops-South Thompson. And they might have thought Terry Lake had a shot at holding onto Kamloops-North Thompson. But nobody expected an easy Liberal majority.

Once again, Kamloops is the bellwether. Does that mean we lead, or that we follow the pack? It doesn’t matter. The record is unblemished. We’re sending two more members of the governing party to represent us in Victoria.

Those who assume Lake will be back in cabinet have it right. He pulled one out of the fire, and that combined with his record as environment minister make it a sure thing.

But anyone thinking Stone will be there with him is mistaken. Despite his years of faithful service to the party, he’s too green. And Clark will have to spread cabinet jobs around geographically, so appointing both Kamloops MLAs to the executive council isn’t likely, at least right now.

But within two years, he’ll probably be rewarded with a cabinet portfolio anyway.

After all, how can a bellwether be denied?

 

 

Voting in today’s election wasn’t as much fun as it should be

This is the place.

It’s not easy being a voter. It’s even harder when there’s no obvious choice, no leader who instills confidence, no single candidate who makes you think “I want this person to represent me,” no party whose policies clearly or even mostly match my own values.

I wasn’t excited about going to the polls today. I voted without conviction. I felt none of the thrill of many former elections when I voted for something. I’d rather vote for something or someone because then you feel you’re part of something.

Sometimes I vote for the candidate, sometimes the party. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Today, my X went beside the candidate for the party I thought likely to do the least damage. That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?

I know, I know, it’s important to vote and you should just do it. Maybe I have voter’s fatigue.

Tonight, there will be much celebrating at the election-night parties of the candidates who win, and brave faces at those who don’t. And there will be much talk of “moving forward.” But I don’t think there’s much reason to be proud of politics in B.C. right now.

 

Why aren’t candidates required to live in ridings they want to represent?

As I ponder my choices (yes, I’m still one of those undecideds, even the day before the election) from among candidates who don’t live in my riding, I wonder why someone who wants to represent me doesn’t have to live here.

There’s no rule that says a candidate must live in the riding in which he or she runs. In fact, the rules expressly state that as long as you’ve been a resident anywhere in the province for long enough, you can run anywhere you want.

That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. In municipal elections, it’s the same thing, but there’s a good reason for it. In small municipalities or regional districts, there often isn’t a big enough population to guarantee good representation. In some regional rural areas, a few dozen votes can get you elected, so the chances of there not being any candidates who actually live in the area are pretty good.

Even in bigger municipalities, there sometimes are just not enough people to make for a good roster. An added factor is that communities like Kamloops often have outlying bedroom communities outside city boundaries, the residents of which commute into town every day and who have a direct stake in civic decisions.

But the boundaries of provincial ridings are drawn, in part, based on population, so every riding surely could generate a candidate for most of the major parties. If no one from within the riding filed nomination papers by deadline, a secondary nomination process could kick into place that allows external candidates to run.

People who don’t live in a riding get on the ballot either because their party doesn’t do a rigorous enough job of recruiting, or because they’re able to defeat resident-candidates in the membership-signup progress.

So, once again in this election, my choices are dominated by candidates who don’t live within the same electoral-district boundaries that I do. It shouldn’t be that way.

New reasons why City councillors need more money

Just when you think you’ve heard every reason possible from politicians why they should give themselves a raise, they come up with some new material.

Coun. Nelly Dever (left) speaks in favour of getting a report on what other City councils are paid, as fellow councillors Nancy Bepple, Pat Wallace and Marg Spina listen.

Yesterday’s discussion in Kamloops City council chambers on Coun. Nancy Bepple’s notice of motion directing staff to report on what their counterparts in other cities get paid was fascinating.

It began with Bepple reciting her previous job experience with major employers. It was a little strange. Mind you, it was Bepple who recently raised the idea of putting parking meters in back alleys.

It got better as the discussion went along. Coun. Nelly Dever had some good sound bites such as, “It’s a band-aid nobody wants to pull off,” and “Suck it up and just do it.” Her analysis of the issue of pay raises was that it is council’s duty to deal with it, yet it’s politically sensitive so nobody wants to touch it.

Thus, the Nike-like “just do it” thing. Which kind of characterizes giving yourself a raise (or, at least, talking about it) as an act of courage. We should be grateful.

Anyway, Coun. Tina Lange echoed the oft-used rationale that council members need to be paid more so that good people will be attracted to run. Two years ago, when Thompson-Nicola Regional District directors voted themselves $5,000 raises, she used a similar argument.

“I value my skills and time and assets,” she said then. “We can’t depend on people who are independently wealthy or retired.”

Yesterday, Tuesday, she asked, almost plaintively, “Am I the best we can get?”

Now that’s a new angle on an old issue. So council members need to approve a raise so that the next council will be better than the current one?

In answer to her question, though, I can’t answer whether Coun. Lange is the best available from the community gene pool of councillors and potential councillors. I can say she’s not the worst. In fact, she’s a good councillor, and always reliable for a good quote. She’s just not in the right place on this issue.

There’s a belief by some councillors that they somehow shoulder more burden than councillors of the past. I’d like to know how.

Do they have more meetings to attend? Nope.

More public hearings? Nope.

More public events? Nope.

More hours per week? Nope.

Has governance changed dramatically? Nope.

Do they need more skills than they used to? Nope.

I would challenge anyone on this council, other than the mayor, to log his or her time over a period of six months or even six weeks and show 30 hours a week, or even 20.

At any rate, they’re going ahead with putting staff to the trouble of coming up with a report they already know will show that several other City councils make more money. Four members of council — Ken Christian, Marg Spina, Pat Wallace and Mayor Peter Milobar — voted against it.

Bepple, Lange, Dever, Donovan Cavers and Arjun Singh voted for it.

Reality check on election statement about Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp.

ACC president Kim Sigurdson at public forum. (Daily News file photo)

UPDATE: There’s been some back and forth on this blog during the past couple of hours that deserves to be reported.

Terry Lake responded by tweeting that he “did not say I set it up but pressured proponent to have public forum based on ICE fund rules.”

He then also tweeted that his reference was to the Ministry of Small Business and Innovation, and further that he had met with then-minister Iian Black, rather than Ministry of Environment. He didn’t say this during the forum but I appreciate the clarification, though the debate was in the context of environment matters.

I noted in a return tweet that the Kamloops Daily News live forum blog quoted him as saying during the debate that “I got the ministry to force the proponent to have a public meeting.” That’s in agreement with my own memory of the comment.

So the ministry involved is clarified. Fact remains, it was through the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce that a forum was held.

Original blog follows:

In the heat of an election campaign, history has a way of being re-written. I suppose candidates can be forgiven once in awhile for exaggerating or making an honest mistake.

In this campaign, there’s been a fair amount of it as the NDP and Liberals battle to convince us who deserves to form the next government.

A small example of that occurred at last Thursday’s KDN-CBC-sponsored candidates’ forum at the Kamloops Convention Centre.

The environment was a major topic at the forum, maybe in part because the environment minister in the last Liberal administration, Terry Lake, was on the stage.

In this context, the issue of the Aboriginal Cogeneration Corp. gasification plant was raised. Those who were around in 2009 and 2010 know that this became a major cause célèbre with local environmentalists who claimed the plant would, as Ruth Madsen put it, “pollute our children and many generations to come and destroy our wonderful city.”

The ACC plan met all the requirements of the Environment Ministry for a discharge permit, got a clean bill of health from the IHA, and was also approved for a development grant from the provincial Innovative Clean Energy fund to help it get established. But it hit the fan as public fears were whipped up about the impact of the project, and MLAs Lake and Kevin Krueger suddenly had a big problem on their hands.

At last Thursday’s forum, Lake told the crowd he had gotten the Environment Ministry to force ACC to hold a public forum on the project, leaving the impression the problem was thus solved.

That’s not how it happened, and Lake is mistaken in his description of how the forum came about. I know this, because I was involved.

Lake and Krueger were in a tough spot and couldn’t overtly criticize ministry staff or tell them to reverse their approval. Instead, they began suggesting that the ICE funding — even though the fund was supposed to be free of political influence — might be withdrawn based on what they said was inadequate consultation.

For months ACC president Kim Sigurdson had refused any meaningful public consultation because he had, technically, met the requirements of his environmental permits and simply wanted to get on with it.

I supported the science of the project, which was meant to solve a major environmental problem with the disposal of used railway ties but, like many others, I felt Sigurdson needed to consult with Kamloops residents.

Early in 2010, I proposed to Sigurdson that he come back to Kamloops and face the music at a public forum. He was concerned about whether such a forum would be conducted in a fair manner by a neutral party. I suggested that the Kamloops Chamber of Commerce might be interested and that the chamber would be a credible, neutral host as it hadn’t taken a position on the proposal.

I then talked with chamber president Leslie Bruchu and she agreed to pitch it to the chamber board, of which I was a director. With the board in agreement, I contacted the local Environment Ministry office, which agreed to send a representative to sit on the panel.

It was the chamber that arranged for the venue, the panel, the moderator (Murray Young of TRU) and the format. Neither Terry Lake nor Kevin Krueger had anything to do with initiating it or setting it up, and the Ministry was a willing participant, not an overseer.

A few days after the packed forum, which was more like a town hall meeting, Sigurdson and his shareholders decided not to proceed with the project.

So, while Lake and Krueger were certainly players, and put some pressure on Sigurdson via the ICE grant, Lake’s statement that the Environment Ministry ordered up a public forum misses the mark.

The winners and the highlights at the Kamloops election forum

Candidates receive their instructions as tonight’s election forum at Kamloops Convention Centre got underway.

Well, I told you there would be no knock-out punches at tonight’s KDN-CBC-sponsored election forum, but it was a whole lot of fun and even somewhat informative. Though there were no knockouts, I proclaim the winner by majority decision, on points, Terry Lake.

Here are a few highlights of the evening:

• Terry Lake was easily the best debater, which was to be expected given his experience and natural speaking ability.
• Tom Friedman was also strong, starting very aggressively but fading a little in the home stretch.
• Peter Sharp’s Best Moment came when he used his previous experience on the regional health board to slam the all talk-little action Liberal record on over-crowding at RIH.
• Kathy Kendall showed she can be articulate but she really does need to study up on the issues.
• The always entertaining and often incomprehensible Brian Alexander got in some good one-liners, such as “I don’t think Terry, as environment minister, knows what an environment is.”
• The Twitter feed was a great addition, though I found myself often paying more attention to the tweets on screen than the candidates on stage.
• Thank you, Donovan Cavers, for shutting up Lake campaigner Emile Scheffel (who believes, I’m sure, that the Liberals are 100-percent responsible for the sun rising each morning) when Scheffel was dominating the Twitter debate. After an hour and 20 minutes of this, Cavers tweeted a polite request that Scheffel desist, and he did.
• Lake’s best zinger totally shut down Dr. Jill Calder of Kamloops Physicians For a Healthy Environment, who demanded a yes or no answer to a loaded question about Ajax. “You wouldn’t do that to your patients,” said Lake. And he impressed with his defence of the Liberal handling of the Pacific Carbon Trust issue.
• Kendall scored high on the applause meter for insisting that the Ajax assessment process needs to be better.
• Todd Stone, as expected, took the opportunity to pin Friedman on his comment a few days ago waffling on the RIH master plan.
• Tweeter Jeremy Reid summed things up quite nicely with, “Lively debate, few young people, partisan twitter feed, & no snacks.”
• Several tweeters called Stone on his use of the slogan-like phrase “continue the momentum,” pointing out that Lake’s campaign slogan was “maintain the momentum” when he ran for mayor.
• Ajax was clearly the big issue, with health care a close second.
• Co-moderators Tim Shoults of The Daily News and Doug Herbert of CBC did a great job, keeping candidates and audience on point and on time.
• Ed Klop, the Conservative candidate in Kamloops-North Thompson followed a spotty performance with a good close, using a “We can’t please all of the people all of the time” theme.
• Shoults wins the Best Closing Remarks award as he thanked the candidates for the sacrifices they make in order to seek office.
• Up until Shoults’ comments, I was leaning toward giving the Best Closing Remarks trophy to Alexander for his good cop-bad cop routine, and for plaintively asking the Liberal and NDP contingents in the audience, “Are you guys paid or what?”

No knockout punch coming in Kamloops ridings

In sports and politics, the knock-out punch has its limitations.

We’ve passed the halfway mark and this election still isn’t much fun. The barbershop poll has it right — the Liberals are ahead on points in Kamloops, but that’s not saying much.

Unless a candidate confesses at tonight’s Daily News-CBC forum to having run a red light or backdated a memo, tomorrow’s news will be that there was “no knockout punch.”

We love knockout punches. Who doesn’t remember where they were the night in 1984 when Brian Mulroney smacked John Turner in the ribs with “You had an option, sir”? Or, “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” that powerhouse uppercut delivered to the chin of the hapless Dan Quayle by Senator Lloyd Bentsen in the 1988 vice-presidential debate?

How could we ever forget Liberal leader Gordon Wilson’s deft jab in the 1991 B.C. campaign: “Here’s a classic example of why nothing ever gets done in the province of British Columbia” as his NDP and Social Credit rivals scrapped beside him like schoolyard bullies?

For a local knockout to be scored, a local issue would have to be defined. Ajax could have been one but, with the Liberals, Conservatives and NDP stuck in various degrees of neutral, and no Green candidates, it never had a chance.

The closest thing to a stumble has been Kamloops South NDP candidate Tom Friedman’s back-peddle on the Royal Inland Hospital expansion.

Liberal candidate Todd Stone scored some major points on a radio forum when he pushed Friedman into sounding equivocal on the NDP’s support for the master plan. A couple of days later, as if to make sure the point was made, the trees started coming down in front of the hospital.

Friedman picked himself up and got back in the ring with an assurance that he actually did support the expansion but if Stone doesn’t use tonight’s forum to get Friedman back in a corner I’ll be surprised.

The other misstep for the NDP came from party leader Adrian Dix when he chose Kamloops, on earth Day, to announce his newfound reservations about the Kinder-Morgan pipeline.

The pipeline is very much a local issue, since it snakes through Kamloops via the North Thompson Valley and its expansion would have a major impact on the community. Dix’s change of heart, couched as a concern about Vancouver becoming an oil-exporting port, is popular with environmentalists and Liberals, too.

The reason environmentalists like it is obvious. Christy Clark likes it even more because it’s given her an opportunity to paint the NDP leader as an anti-growth flip-flopper.  Changing your mind on an issue as it develops isn’t such a bad thing, but you’ve got to be straight forward about it. Dix tried way too hard to avoid admitting a turn-about.

Which leaves education. Tough to debate education when the Liberal candidates refuse to show up.  So if you count their refusal to attend the teachers’ forum as a mistake, and Kinder Morgan as a local issue, the Liberals are still ahead 2-1 as we finish the half-time break.

A knockout punch would be exciting, but we tend to over-rate them anyway. Bentsen was beaten by Quale, Mulroney left the arena when his own party was out on its feet, and Wilson never won another round.

Even Joe Louis lost his crown to Rocky Marciano.