About Nanaimo

   Nanaimo, an unassuming city on Vancouver Island mostly known to those of us who do not live there for being a ferry terminal connecting us to the delights and horrors of Vancouver, has been in the international news recently. 

   Naturally, they like the attention, particularly the new Mayor, Leonard Krog, who hasn’t had this much attention since he was a government cabinet minister some 20 years ago.

   The first splash of notoriety, a story covered by all the major news sources, emerged this spring, when Canada Post issued a series of postage stamps celebrating famous Canadian desserts: butter tart, tart au sucre,  blueberry grunt, saskatoon berry pie, and, of course, our favourite, the Nanaimo bar. 

   This turned into a kerfuffle, and hence became newsworthy, when people actually familiar with Nanaimo bars noticed that the proportions were all wrong. 

   So what does the image on the stamp look like? It looks like a slice of cheesecake, that’s what, and that’s not the Nanaimo bar we on this coast know.

   Naturally I assumed some graphic designer back East was responsible for this travesty, so was not impressed to discover that the contracted studio is actually in Vancouver. However, further research led to the actual artist, who is the noted food painter, Mary Ellen Johnston from South Carolina, so my suspicions turned out to be justified after all.

  Then came May 5, when “Nanaimo” went to the polls for a federal by-election, and the Green candidate won for only the second time ever in a Canadian federal election, thus doubling Green representation in the House.

   Naturally Green promoters are ecstatic over this result, crowing all manner of future election success. 

   But I wouldn’t put a penny on either Paul Manley retaining the seat in October (although he could) or the Greens expanding their representation in BC (although that could also happen). 

   Here’s why:

1.  Nanaimo-Ladysmith is a new riding, created from 2 older ones, Nanaimo-Cowichan, handily won by Jean Crowder of the NDP in 2011, and Nanaimo-Alberni, won equally handily by James Lunney of the Conservatives. 

   In 2015 Sheila Malcolmson of the NDP won Nanaimo-Ladysmith with only 33.2%, the lowest percentage win of any riding in BC in that election. 

   In other words, the common knowledge that “Nanaimo is an NDP stronghold” is just wrong in the case of this riding, even though it has “Nanaimo” in its name.

2.  Paul Manley, who won this time (37.3%) came fourth with 20% in 2015. In that election he had wanted to follow his father, James Manley, who represented Nanaimo-Cowichan for the NDP in the 80’s. However, his outspoken views on Palestine scuppered that hope, so he became a Green.

   In other words, what happened this time was that the NDP vote (23.1%), and the Liberal vote (11%) collapsed from 2015, and many of those voters went to Manley and the Greens instead. 

3.  The Conservative vote went from 23.4% to 24.8%, hardly a factor. The party was, however, very happy with John Hirst, an “associate manager” at Sun Life Financial in Nanaimo, and he claims he’ll win next time. Expect him to try again in October.

4.  By all accounts the NDP candidate, Bob Chamberlin, was a splendid candidate, a vice-president of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, experienced politically, and well-spoken. However, he is from northern Vancouver Island, a first-nations person but not Salish, as are the aboriginal voters of the riding. He had no obvious connection to the area.

   I don’t think being aboriginal prevents candidates from being elected for the NDP or the Liberals, but I don’t think it helps either, particularly after the hash Jody Wilson-Raybould made of being the Liberal Attorney-General/Justice Minister. (By way of consequence, I don’t anticipate another aboriginal cabinet minister in the federal government for a long time. And I think the electorate, some of which is never very far from overtly-racist where aboriginals are concerned, has become or continues to be chary of aboriginal politicians, particularly those like Bob and Jody who take leadership roles in aboriginal politics.)

5.  Michelle Corfield the Liberal candidate who got 11% at least lives and has a career in Nanaimo, although her band is in the Ucluelet area. She is also active in her band’s politics, which will not have helped.

   Did the Liberals imagine they had a shot at taking this riding? The Prime Minister never got closer than Tofino.

6.  It may be coincidence, but by now it will be obvious that two white guys came first and second, followed by an aboriginal guy and, far behind, an aboriginal female. Draw whatever conclusions appear appropriate, as I obviously have.

7.  By-elections are almost never much of a barometer of voter intentions during a federal election. For one thing, that campaign is still (in spite of the poisonous anti-Trudeau ad campaign presently underway) on the margins of most voters’ consciousness. By September things could be vastly different; by then we could be deciding whether we want a repeat of the Conservative politics and policies, the widespread rejection of which the Liberal campaign of 2015 exploited so effectively, or another term of the present Liberal government. Or a minority government of either stripe.

   In any case, many of us will be voting not for what we want, necessarily, but reacting to what we definitely don’t want.

   And even more of us will in effect be voting for the Prime Minister we want, because that’s how the world sees us.

8.  Unless something miraculous happens, I think the NDP is in deep trouble federally. Electing Jagmeet Singh as leader has not helped, not even in BC. Not even after he won his Burnaby seat, which, because he won it in a by-election, he could well have trouble holding. He’s obviously a competent politician, but he doesn’t, as far as I can tell, inspire, and NDP leaders need to inspire to be effective. The turban doesn’t help, probably not even in Sikh-dominated ridings. So I think every sitting NDP MP and every 2019 NDP candidate will have his or her work cut out for her or him, and most will lose.

   The number of sitting NDP MPs who have decided to retire tells the story.

9.  The story of the 2019 federal election in Nanaimo-Ladysmith and many other ridings is likely to be decided by where the NDP vote goes, and I’m still betting that when the crunch comes and it becomes clear that the Conservatives and Andrew Scheer are the likely alternative, and not the Greens, most of it will go Liberal, just like it did in 2015.

Hopefully the last on this theme

Before we confer political sainthood on Ms Wilson-Raybouldt for “speaking truth to power” and “telling her truth”, perhaps we could consider the hypocrisy of a Justice Minister who objects to the Prime Minister and his staff talking about the politics arising from her decisions but apparently feels comfortable questioning the judgment and policies of the Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister in public. (https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/raybould-wernick-framework-1.5029144)

Another try

Let us do a little thought experiment: Suppose that Prime Minister Trudeau had, instead of Ms Wilson-Raybould, appointed Randeep Sarai (also a lawyer, also from BC's lower mainland, but obviously neither aboriginal nor female) as Justice Minister. Suppose further that he had been shuffled, for whatever reason, from his portfolio into Veterans Affairs just after the Globe broke the SNC-Lavalin story.
Would anyone be crying "scandal"?

Letter to the Globe

The editor:
Now that so many commentators have decided the shuffle of Jody Wilson-Raybould is both a feminist and an aboriginal issue, with the clear implication that she was consequently politically untouchable, one wonders whether we will ever see such an appointment again.

Another (very mi9nor) diesel adventure

On Sunday, as I was pulling up the hill just outside our house, the car burped. Then immediately resumed normal operation. But the yellow engine icon came on, and that means "take it to the dealer".
Except it was not there on Monday, so I assumed a temporary aberration.
However, it came back yesterday so I phoned for an appointment. In any case it was also due for routine maintenance.
The car and I were at the garage in Courtenay by 10 this morning; I was told it would be about two hours.
As usual.
Got out my laptop and read all about the Jody scandal, from numerous points of view. None changed my own.
Just before noon Michael, the service manager, came to tell me that they'd found the problem, and the resolution would be replacing the intake manifold, which would take not less than 3 hours and they had one in stock. The good news: the fix was a belated part of the emissions fix, so it wouldn't cost anything.
I decided my day was hooped anyway, so rather than reschedule, told him to have his technician go ahead.
Took myself to lunch at the pub, came back, finished the paper, and was done by 2:30, home by 3:30.
The car runs like a top, just as it did before I took it in.
But there's no engine icon.

The boy in the hat

The picture in question — the video, actually — electrified social media over the weekend. In it, a white high school boy wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, confronts an older Native American man who is beating a ceremonial drum and singing a Native song. The encounter took place Friday on the National Mall. The man was there as part of the Indigenous Peoples March. The boy was with a group from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky that was participating in the “March For Life” anti-abortion rally.
The man sings. The boy smirks. Some of his classmates mock the Native man. Someone yells, “Build the wall!” And there was, for many of us, something starkly symbolic in all of it, something that spoke of American fracture.

And there still is, because even in the story that the boy has been telling — the story that’s supposed to exonerate him and leave him with “nothing to apologize for” he is still the one who escalates this into a confrontation.

The students began what they described as a school spirit chant to drown out the black men. Tensions were high. And into this cauldron of ideology and identity stepped Nathan Phillips, a 64-year-old elder of the Omaha people and a Vietnam veteran. His aim in walking through the crowd, he said, was to settle things down. As he told The New York Times, “I stepped in between to pray.”
The crowd, he said, parted to let him through. All except for the boy, since identified as Nick Sandmann, a junior. Phillips said the boy blocked him when he moved left. When he moved right, Sandmann did the same.
In a written statement, the boy denied blocking Phillips. “To be honest,” he wrote, “I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me.”

But the boy in that video, smirking, trying not to laugh, is not startled or confused. He looks, rather, entitled and smug.
If you’re walking down the sidewalk and someone steps directly in your path, refusing to move, and when you try to step around them, that person moves to block your way, which if you is causing a confrontation? Sandmann is just a Pool Patty who happens to have a PR firm and media connections.
Excerpts from a column by Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald commentary by Mark Sumner, Daily Kos

Yabbut.
I used to be a high school teacher. Admittedly I’m not American, and my culture isn’t either Kentuckian nor American Catholic.
Consequently, I don’t understand this story at all.
OK; I get that they’re from a Catholic private boys’ school, and that their values might not be mine. Nevertheless.
This took place on a Friday, when schools are normally in session. The boy in question is obviously young, apparently a “junior”, which in our system makes him a Grade 11 student. In our system Grade 11 students aren’t considered sufficiently civilized to send off on their own, and certainly not in a group.
So I have some questions:
1. What is the point of sending a group of teenaged boys from Kentucky to an anti-abortion rally in Washington DC? Field trip?
2. Who allowed them to wear those hats, which immediately identified them as Trump acolytes? What point did their supervisors, assuming they had some, think they were making?
3. Where are the supervising teachers?! Doesn’t this incident make a mockery of the Catholic in their school name? Doesn’t it speak volumes about the school? Would you send your kid there?
4. The Reverend John Stowe, Bishop of Lexington, apologized for the incident and made the relevant case: "It astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life- threatening policies," he wrote.
5. So it is interesting that the Most Reverend Roger Foys, Bishop of Covington Diocese, would have a different take, illustrating where his moral compass is set: "We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it," Foys wrote. "I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family, as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal."
6. There’s still no apology from Nick Sandman, the boy caught on camera most prominently. Instead, his parents hired a PR firm, and everyone spun. Interesting life lesson, that.
7. I haven’t been able to find any statement by the school or its administration. Except this, an email to parents: “The incident that took place at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. is being fully investigated by an

independent third-party investigator. Based upon and following an investigation, we will be taking the appropriate action regarding this matter,” the email reads. “Please know that the administration is currently working with the Diocese, local police departments, and local authorities to ensure the safety of our students, faculty and staff.”
8. Mind-boggling, I’d say, and totally foreign to my experience of some 35 years in public high schools.

Letter to Minister of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Coast Guard

Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson,

Minister of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard

House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario

K1A 0A6

cc Rachel Blainey, MP

House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario

K1A 0A6

383 Frances Avenue

Campbell River, BC

V9W 1Y1

January 26, 2019

Dear Minister Wilkinson,

I wish to add my name to the long list of people who object to the roe herring fishery that takes place annually off Hornby and Denman Islands.

As you are from the west Coast you will be aware of the historic and current importance of herring in the viability of Chinook salmon and the orcas which feed on them.

You will also be aware that these two species, once so numerous, are in real danger of disappearing, and that the Hornby/Denman herring spawn is the last of the many that occurred on our coast as recently as the 1970’s, when they first started to be fished in a concerted way and also started to disappear.

You will also be aware that this is no longer a winner for what is left of the fishing industry on our coast.

Please use your office to stop this fishery before it too disappears.

Yours very sincerely,

Another rejected letter...

The Globe didn't like this enough to publish it when I sent it to the editor on December 31; however, I just came across it again, and I still like it, and still think it both concise and relevant:

On this side of the Rockies we're getting a little tired of Albertans whining about their economy and oil glut and pretending it's somehow our fault.
Alberta's in trouble? Their per capita GDP in 2017 was $20,000 more than Canada's, $21,000 more than ours.
They need their pipeline? Not at the expense of our coastal economy, they don't. If there's an over-supply, stop producing so much. The resource won't go away.
They're paying more than their share in equalization? They're just paying their federal taxes, like the rest of us. What the feds do with that money afterwards is Canada's problem, not Alberta's.
They're having trouble paying for their government services? That's what taxes are for. The rest of us pay sales tax; they don't.
Enough, already! 

Also, I haven't seen any of the arguments presented  here refuted.

Here we go again

I suppose it's useful that some things are entirely predictable, returning in a cyclical way. Case in point: To Kill a Mockingbird is in the headlines again.
Last time this was because Harper Lee had died and her heirs were playing sillybuggers with her reputation. Before that it was some school in one of the benighted parts of the southern USA which had banished the book from consideration in English classrooms because (and I don't suppose my recollection here is literally accurate) the word “nigger” appeared in it no fewer than nineteen times and besides, it didn't paint a very nice picture of poor white people.
This time it's because “Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services at Peel District School Board” has written a memo on behalf of her Board:
“The use of racist texts as entry points into discussions about racism is hardly for the benefit of Black students who already experience racism. This should give us pause — who does the use of these texts centre? Who does it serve? Why do we continue to teach them?”
and furthermore
“White writers write from their own schemas, their own perspectives and white supremacist frameworks that reflect the specificity of their culture and history on racialized peoples.”
Now I'm quite prepared to believe that Ms Grewal is expert in detecting racism and even that her opinions on the subject have some basis in reality, but my experience tells me she has either no idea about, or has forgotten the realities of, teaching English to students in Grade 9 or 10, when this novel is usually taught.
As any thinking person might expect, there are reasons why the book is as widely taught as it is. The most important of these reasons is, of course, that it has featured on English curricula for a very long time, and therefore there are many copies in the bookroom. I believe BC classrooms were first exposed to it in the late '60s, when all textbooks were sourced from (and incidentally, paid for by) the Ministry, which ran an enormous warehouse for textbooks. The downside of this scheme was of course that only Ministry textbooks filled the book rooms of the province's high schools; the upside was that teachers knew that the books they used were already Ministry approved and that they almost always could obtain enough for their classes.
Aside: My esteemed colleague, Deane Hutchinson was nonetheless once hauled up in front of the Board in Campbell River to explain why he had had the audacity to use Thomas Hardy's “The Mayor of Casterbridge” (yes, originally procured from the Ministry's own warehouse!) in his Grade 12 English class. Did Mr Hutchinson not understand that in it a woman was sold? And that this was totally inappropriate? asked the trustee from Sayward.
Of course books that were sourced in this way filled the bookrooms of high schools long after the Ministry had outsourced the purchase of books to the schools and school districts. And the results were entirely predictable: “An entire, usable set of a novel appropriate for use in Grade 10? Of course I'll use it!”
Another aside: In several of my schools I was the de-facto co-ordinator of the English teachers. As such I winnowed the unused books in at least three English Resource Rooms. The most memorable of these was when I taught at Phoenix Middle School, which for some reason had inherited all the books from the original school on that site, Campbell River Secondary School. So it was my pleasure to consign to the recycling bins some 250 copies of an inadequately-translated version of “The Illiad” which, near as I could tell, had never been opened.
The second reason for the book's apparent popularity among English teachers: it's a relatively easy read. This fact should not be underestimated in the age of the integrated high school classroom, because

the reading abilities of the students in it capable of reading a novel at all might easily go from university-ready to Grade 6.
And then there's “What will we talk about? What will the students write about? Will it hold their attention?” Suffice it to say the story in Mockingbird checks all the boxes.
Of course, what the entire brouhaha misses is the point of “teaching novels” in the English curriculum. Just after I retired I wrote a pamphlet dealing with some of my English teaching beliefs while providing some practical advice. Here's what I wrote on the subject of the secondary reading program:

So here’s the “vision statement” for the reading part of the English program: we want our students to understand how

writing works, and how a good writer manipulates his readers. We want our students to be receptive to everything the

writer does, so that the communication between writer and reader is as complete as possible. In short, we want our students to be truly sophisticated readers. 

Notice that there's nothing there about “teaching about racism” or “focus on aboriginal (feminist, Canadian, Great, etc.) writers”. The materials you uses with your students as an English teacher are not very important; teaching English is about developing the literacy skills of all your students, and anything that works against that, I believe passionately, should be discouraged as counter-productive.
The corollary of that statement, equally valid, is that everything that works towards the end of improved literacy should be accepted and encouraged.
Consequently, here's my totally-unsolicited advice for Ms Grewal and the Peel Board: if the Board has done its job, the English teachers you hired are highly-educated and trained professionals. Provide them with adequate resources, then let them do the job.

Beaver Lodge Forest Lands: a Campbell River treasure

It’s 7:30 on a snowy morning in December, and the dog we’re looking after and I have just arrived at the access to our favourite walking trail. It’s just starting to get light. Setting out, we don’t see anyone, but judging from the tracks we’re not the first, and half a kilometre later as we join the main trail we can see the tracks we followed in were not the first either. We still haven’t seen or heard anyone, although there appears to be a headlamp in the distance.

All of us are taking this early-morning walk in the Beaver Lodge Forest Lands, a mostly-undeveloped forest large enough to hold about 1 1/4 Stanley Parks on the edge of the developed part of Campbell River, administered by the BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources. It is an “experimental forest”; consequently, its sole amenities consist of large garbage cans at several of the access points, three small parking lots, several logging-road-quality roads and bridges, and a network of narrow trails maintained by the Ministry and local environmental charity Greenways Land Trust.

And most of it is used all the time, by dog walkers, by bike commuters and mountain bikers, by runners, by school classes, and by people just out for a stroll. All of this activity is new since the mid-’90s, and there’s a story in that fact.

Shortly after we arrived in Campbell River in 1973, we became aware of a trail of sorts connecting Carihi, the high school at which I was teaching, with Southgate, the new one in Willow Point. We called it the “Jeep trail”, and it was pretty much impassible for much of the year because of washouts, floods, and mud.*  I didn’t realize at the time that the trail was actually what was left of a logging railway grade, abandoned after the area had been clearcut in the 1930’s. In any case, at the time it was pretty much out of the way in the bush, and didn’t play much part in our lives, although I occasionally ran it during the summer months.**

By the late 80’s the District Municipality (that would become the City of Campbell River in the 2000’s) logically assuming the area was merely part of the Provincial forest, was drawing up plans to put housing on much of it after Dogwood Street had been extended across the community, as mandated by the new municipal plan. North Island College and the School District had also spoken for some land near the end of Rockland Road for their new joint campus.

Fortunately for Campbell River and particularly those of us who now use the Lands regularly, the Municipality’s plans were sabotaged, although Dogwood Street was eventually pushed through and the joint Timberline Campus was built as planned.

And that was because some people in Campbell River*** almost remembered that the land in question wasn’t actually land the Province could give away. And then someone, searching for backup to this hunch, found the relevant documents in the Provincial Archives in Victoria: it seems Elk River Timber, the company that had logged the land, had donated the clearcut to the Province of BC in 1931 to demonstrate “experimental work in reforestation and forest management”. The donation was a “Trust” that had a covenant attached. 

Furthermore, the area had been used for its designated purpose: it became the first replanted area in BC in the 30’s, and almost the entire area was either replanted or re-seeded in the years following. The rather amazing results are visible today.

If you imagine that on hearing this the Mayor and Council rolled over and played dead, you would be seriously wrong. They fought this discovery with everything they had. Fortunately for those of us who now live in Campbell River, they did not have the ear of the BC Government, however, because this was during one of the few periods in BC history when the province had an NDP government, and development wasn’t King. Furthermore, our MLA was Colin Gabelmann, the Attorney-General of BC, and while he was characteristically scrupulous about not meddling in partisan activity, he wasn’t going to be party to overturning a Trust, and he knew who to talk to and who to compromise with to get a deal. In other words, you won’t find him in the forefront of any of the official documentation, but his fingerprints are all over the deal that was eventually struck: Dogwood went through to connect to the new Jubilee Parkway, which in turn connects Campbell River to the Inland Highway, the Timberline Campus was built, and, to complete the compromise, while 77 hectares were removed, about 164 hectares were bought and added by way of compensation. 

This fact explains why there is so much variation in the size and kinds of vegetation outside the principal corridor.

Over the intervening years several federally and provincially funded projects have greatly improved the infrastructure of the Lands, the most recent being the addition of 5 industry-standard bridges on the main roads. These days one can walk or run or bike there year-round, which is why, increasingly, Campbell Riverites do.

But it isn’t a park. There are no bathrooms. People who wished to exploit the area for commercial purposes have been quickly dissuaded. Initially some enthusiastic youths attempted to create their own trails; these have now all been either incorporated or removed. 

And theoretically we could still see logging there, although I suspect all hell would break loose if that were attempted. In fact, shortly after Dogwood Street was completed, a windstorm knocked down a significant number of large trees close to where Hilchey Road meets Dogwood. Logging equipment and loggers came in to remove the trees. This very nearly turned into an “incident”, which only the logic of removing such a quantity of valuable timber and the good use the wood would be put to prevented.

The Lands are also quite flat, broken only by the various appendages of Simms Creek, perfect for elderly walkers, but the terrain offers no particular challenges for the expert mountain biker. Nonetheless, every weekend one can spot people on bikes both on the main roads and trails, on the bike  trails abutting the Lands, and exploiting its furthest reaches. I’m told it’s a good fit for beginners, although the claim on one Googled site that “the Beav” could be entirely conquered in about an hour is surely a pipe dream!

There is much that makes Campbell River one of the best places in the world to live, including the climate, many spectacular views of the water, and excellent places to walk year-round, including the Beaver Lodge Forestry Lands. 

We think we were pretty clever to have picked it for our place.

Well, clever and very lucky, of course.

*For a while several running-enthusiast colleagues and I plotted to start a cross-country race, to be held in October before things got too wet, to be called the “Great Muddy”, and to be run between the two schools. But it came to naught when we went to England for a year.

**Although one summer I drove our old Rambler Ambassador from Southgate on the remnants of logging roads to within sight of the airport before being forced to backtrack.

***Yes, I know who they are, but I don’t want to be accused of getting details wrong and/or missing someone significant. Anyway, you probably don’t know them, and they don’t read my blog so we’ll just leave this detail to the reporters.  

(Those readers interested in the details of the history could watch this very interesting and informative video posted to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgdoGtBKaY0)