Some lessons from school...#2 Bending the bureaucracy

I make no case for the literal accuracy of these accounts, and my memory has almost certainly filled in the blanks with verisimilitudinous detail. Nonetheless, they are in every other respect accurate.

It’s November, 50 years ago, Quesnel Secondary. 

A group of girls has assembled in Mr. Havelaar’s room. They are organized by a girl in Mr Havelaar’s class, a mouthy spark-plug of a girl called Enid Goodman and are clearly agitated and unhappy,  looking for a solution to their problem.

But it’s not Mr Havelaar they are unhappy with; it’s the school’s dress code. Mr Havelaar has expressed an interest in their dilemma.

This is the gist of their complaint: Quesnel becomes very cold in winter, and over 60% of the students who attend Quesnel Secondary arrive by school bus. That involves waiting for the bus in temperatures that occasionally dip as low as -35 degrees fahrenheit (the temperature at which the buses stop picking up students) You don’t do that wearing a skirt or dress, as required by the school’s dress code for girls. So what happens is that the students are dropped off, the girls go to the girls’ washroom to change, and there isn’t room. So they wait until there is. If the bell for the start of classes has already gone, they then have to go to the office, pick up a late slip, and arrive in class late.

All of this could be solved by simply allowing girls to wear pants in school. The girls have tried the normal channels without success.

This is curious, because the change has already happened in much of the province, including schools in Victoria, which obviously has a much less-severe climate.

But the rules have yet to change in Quesnel. 

You may well ask why that would be, and Mr Havelaar, although he is a teacher new to the school and therefore hasn’t been through these wars before, has a theory:

Quesnel Secondary is unusual in the province, maybe unique, in that nearly 50% of its staff comes from overseas, particularly Australia and the UK. These teachers, admirable as many of them are, were educated and trained in very different systems; some of the women on the staff are particularly single-minded in their determination to “civilize” the girls of the Cariboo. They are quite convinced that school uniforms would be an answer. 

Add that to the fact that the principal is a new arrival and that therefore the school’s administration is still finding its feet, and you have the root of the problem.

So, what to do? 

What would Saul Alinsky do?

Here a brief digression:

One can read all about Saul Alinsky, American “community activist and political theorist” in the extensive Wikipedia article, but for our purposes the fact that in 1946 he published a tract called “Reveille for Radicals”, which I read sometime in the mid-60’s, is the salient point. In it he describes a number of apparently intractable social issues which were solved by using the vulnerable points of the offending bureaucracy against that bureaucracy in creative ways. I was much impressed, and have kept the advice close ever since.

Anyway, back to the girls and the dress code.

The plan we come up with, when we do, is the very essence of elegance and simplicity. We ask: 

Who do we need to influence? The administration.

Who holds the keys to that influence? The secretaries, who sit outside the office, have to deal with the girls and their late slips, and who the administrators will hear from if they’re unhappy.

Solution: the girls will wait until the last minute before changing. The girls’ bathroom will be even more plugged than usual. There will be a very long line-up for late slips. The school will be seriously disrupted, and the secretaries will become seriously annoyed.

All that was required was that the girls had to organize themselves to follow the plan, which they did.

There was some blowback, but very few days later the administration capitulated, and pants were permitted.

Score one for Girl Power, and note that the bureaucracy got the peace it wanted, as well.

My other illustration of bending the bureaucracy is from Timberline, only 20 or so years ago, and I had almost nothing to do with it.

From the time Timberline opened, student smoking was an issue. I believe we first tried a “smoking room”, but that quickly proved to be unsatisfactory. And then the space was required for a classroom. There was a “smoking area” just outside the back doors of the school. The art-teaching staff, who had their classrooms in that part of the building, were less than enchanted with the mess and ambient smoke, and there were pretty-much constant reminders that duty staff had to be more vigilant in patrolling. Finally the smoking area was banished across the field, with the attendant and predictable mess, strife, and patrolling problems.

The staff absolutely hated student smoking, but knew it would happen regardless, particularly due to the joint-occupancy of the facility with North Island College. So we made the best of a bad situation.

And then the government of the day went on a smoking crusade, and declared that all public institutions had to ban smoking on or near the premises.

The Board and Superintendent had no choice but to declare that schools would be smoke-free, and that included Timberline. Student smoking was banished.

Of course, that didn’t prevent students smoking.

They merely moved off school property, onto the sidewalks on Dogwood and Rockland. And into the adjoining Beaver Lodge Lands.

Teachers were asked to patrol these venues (and this is where I do play a small part) but the staff absolutely refused. Our position was that if these areas were to be patrolled, other people would have to do it, teachers having no authority off school property.

The administration briefly tried to control the problem, but it soon became obvious that, in order to get any handle at all on the situation, they would be spending much of their day policing smokers.

And then the calls from the public started to come in, not just from people who were upset and offended by students from Timberline, but also those from Carihi. And the mess built up, without any way of dealing with it.

Eventually, and without any public declaration, the smokers were unofficially re-admitted to school property, where they were at least out of sight.

Alinsky would be proud of them!

Some lessons from school... #1: confronting “ism’s”

These incidents happened a long time ago, and I make no special claims for the accuracy of my recollections. They are based on my fallible memory, my inclination to organize memorable incidents into anecdotes, and not on a written record. 

The year after Robron Secondary opened, John and I joined the faculty.

It was a brand-new building -- so new, in fact, that there was still some ongoing construction – which housed a newly-assembled student body, staff, and administration. There were still a lot of start-up problems, and before we left, our solicitous colleagues at Carihi had made a point of acquainting us with rumours about all of them.

The school had opened with Grades 8 to 10, added Grade 11 the year we joined, and 12 the year after. With very few exceptions the school drew its student body from Pinecrest and Rockland, the most middle-class parts of Campbell River. Consequently, with the exception of a significant cohort of children of immigrant South Asian parents, the school was very white.

In the years when there was still a forest between Rockland and Pinecrest, before Robron and that part of Campbell River were built up in other words, there had been a number of nasty racist incidents in our Rockland neighbourhood, including at least one pitched battle involving a group of Sikh young men pitted against a group of their Campbell River yahoo contemporaries. Fortunately, if I’m remembering correctly, the police managed to break it up before any serious physical damage was be done. But the tone had been set.

Anyway, that legacy had entered the school’s culture, carried by some of the students, including some of the most senior and the most socially elite.  

Racism was more overt in Robron than I had ever experienced it in a school before, and particularly ugly when it involved South Asian girls, who had the double burden of being obviously South Asian and female. So it wasn’t at all surprising when it became the topic of a staff meeting.

I’ve always attributed the plan that emerged to the Vice-Principal/Principal team of David Brown and Kieran O’Neill. It now seems unlikely there wasn’t some kind of class instructional component, it being a school, and all, but what has stuck with me is the part that actually worked. And that was simplicity itself: it required each member of the entire staff to instantly confront any racist act or word with the admonition: “We don’t do that here.”

Lecture, lesson, follow-up not required: just “don’t”.

I initially had my doubts. In my experience, teachers (and I count in my own inclinations here) don’t like confronting students they don’t know well, and don’t like dealing with issues not directly connected to their particular part of the curriculum. Especially social issues like racist beliefs and culture; teachers tend to believe schools have Counsellors and Administrators to tackle those tasks. Furthermore, this initiative required unanimity, which is also really hard to achieve on a very diverse staff.

But it worked, and remarkably soon we (almost) never again had to confront racist sentiments in the halls.

Years later, when Timberline opened, melding the high school components of Robron (closing because of dropping student numbers) and Southgate (becoming a middle school) we experienced a similar issue. For some reason homophobic expressions were very common that first year; you literally couldn’t travel the halls and common areas without hearing someone call someone else a “fag” usually in jest, but frequently to wound or belittle. 

That was clearly inappropriate and unacceptable, and the staff agreed to institute a program similar to the one that had been a success at Robron, years earlier. 

This time the program initially appeared to be less successful than before, possibly because it was a much larger school, possibly because there were many more common areas and hallways which were hard to monitor, and probably because there was less staff buy-in. But it was successful in the longer run; by the time I retired some seven years later one hardly ever heard homophobic slurs in the hallways.

I’m quite sure no fundamental racist or homophobic beliefs were modified, but they certainly weren’t amplified either, and that’s the point. It is perhaps enough that it became unacceptable to express them at school. 

I think that’s probably as much as any school can aspire to.

Bilingual/bilingue

I’m only 75, and I’ve already been bilingual twice.

The first time, of course, was that relatively brief period after arriving in Canada between becoming functional in English and then dropping the Dutch entirely, even at home.

At first my parents really tried to maintain our Dutch at home and we must have done that, because at the time my mom’s English really wasn’t up to much. But when I was in Grade 6 my parents decided that they needed to go to Normal School to become teachers, and so Dutch was dropped en famille in favour of English. The family never went back.  My sister, who was 5 when we left Holland, has since regained a fair bit of fluency and my youngest brother, who wasn’t actually speaking yet when we left, spent a year in Holland after high school and became quite proficient. I, who first learned to read in Holland, can still read rudimentary Dutch, very slowly, because I have to sound the words out, and have retained an accent in the few words and phrases I can bring up when the situation requires that temporarily convinces Dutch speakers that I remain competent. 

It doesn’t take many sentences of very juvenile Dutch delivered in that authentic Dutch accent to disabuse them of that thought, however!

I’m often asked whether I regret that loss of my native language. No, I don’t. Our Dutch relatives are all really comfortable in English and my parents only spoke Dutch when relatives from Holland visited, and sometimes not then, so our incentives were and are limited. It’s not like Dutch is a very useful language...

Unlike French, which is, and especially in Canada. 

My dad had received a classic “Gymnasium” education: Dutch, French, English, German, Latin, and Greek. He was quite sure that his children should emulate that model to the extent possible, which meant English, French, and Latin. Being the eldest, I got to try out this educational theory, which is why I took Latin by Correspondence in Grade 9 and the second level in Grade 10 in a school where it was offered by my favourite teacher, who more regularly taught English.

I hated Latin, which was all rules of grammar and their application and I just hated rules of grammar. The joys of solving the elegant puzzle of Latin constructions, which people like my spouse claim to have relished, entirely escaped me.

Lesson learned: though it was available in a few schools in BC and always by Correspondence until the beginning of the present century, no other Havelaar took Latin in a Canadian high school. (Sandy took it in high school and at UVic, but she was an Irvine at the time!)**

But I liked French, took it all the way through high school, was active in the French Club, did fine, marks-wise, and cleverly took the “recommendation” on offer instead of taking the government exam, which undoubtedly required more knowledge of grammar than I had bothered to acquire.

Here the trail gets predictably sticky: because I had passed Grade 12 French, I was required to take the harder of the two first-year options at Uvic. And because I did well enough in that to pass comfortably, I was required to take the follow-up course the next year. 

And that is where my ability to fake competence in French came up against the hard reality of never actually mastering the grammar. Not once, but twice.

Eventually the rules were changed, and I managed to get my BA without second-year French.

Fast-forward a significant number of years. We’re living in Campbell River, where I’m teaching high school English and Sandy is teaching music theory. Sandy has a BA in French, the first three of our 4 children are already enrolled in French Immersion, and the youngest is due to enter “la maternelle” in the fall. I can see how this is going to end if I don’t do something about my lack of French skills: in a very few years the entire family is going to have conversations in a language I don’t understand. 

Besides, my failure still rankles.

So we decide to take a year off, rent out our house, and pile the entire Troop in our large, 12-passenger van. We’re off to Quebec City, where I’ve enrolled in a “French for non-Francophones” program at Université Laval and where the kids will spend the year in unilingual Quebec schools.

I arrive at Laval on the appointed day at the appointed lecture hall so I can take the competence exam, which will place me in the appropriate level. And once again my superficial appearance of competence strikes: I’m placed in the top level, along with students who are actually reasonably competent, in that they can speak what for all the world sounds like French to me. People who graduated from French Immersion programs but apparently didn’t learn the fine points, for example.

I realize immediately that I’m in well over my head.

There are 20 of us in the group, and I’m the oldest and least-competent. In the first session, trying to remember enough to explain myself to the class, I explain that “mon mari” and I normally live in Colombie-Britannique... and am at first puzzled by the burst of spontaneous laughter, then humiliated to discover that I’ve just told the class my that husband and I... You get the picture. 

It doesn’t get better for some time, and I’ve never worked harder or more persistently at anything academic than I did that year. Fear of being exposed as incompetent is a great motivator. But the results were worth the effort. By the end of December I had graduated out of the FNF program, and by the end of the year had completed the first half of Laval’s first-year French program.

For the second time in my life, I was declared and felt bilingual.

(Three years later I had negotiated an exchange to teach English in a rural school halfway between Victoriaville and Drummondville, so we returned to Quebec. But that’s another story.)

So that was me; what about the rest of the family?

When our kids started in French Immersion we heard a lot from “experts” who object to the program because: Immersion French is typically full of errors and anglicisms; too many of the students never achieve real mastery; the students’ English skills will deteriorate; the program is elitist.  There may be kernels of truth in all those observations, although we didn’t experience any of them.

Once Sandy had found us a place to live she registered the kids in local schools. For the three older ones, the transition was entirely seamless, as an anecdote will illustrate: Enid had just completed Grade 1 in Campbell River with Julie, a lovely young teacher originally from rural Quebec. In Beauport, where we now lived, she was in a Grade 2 class with two teachers, only one of whom Sandy had met previously. In October, during parent-teacher conferences, she met the other: “Enid is a good student, but has curious holes in her vocabulary. She didn’t know what a “chaloupe” is, for example.” Apparently no one had mentioned that Enid was an anglophone from BC!

Robin, our youngest, had a different experience: she started in the “maternelle” at another school and was picked up and dropped off each day by a little yellow bus. For the first few months of Maternelle parents were not welcome at the school, where there were no English speakers. In other words, she replicated the traditional immigrant experience: didn’t speak at school at all until late January and refused to speak English by the time we returned home again in July. Just like her dad!

Our kids are now the age Sandy and I were at the time. All of them are still competent in French, two have children in BC’s francophone school system (District 93) and two teach French in public high schools. All of them have had occasions to use their French skills.

As for me, we last lived in Quebec nearly 30 years ago, and what you don’t use, you lose. I no longer feel comfortable speaking (terrible accent never went away!) and writing French. I think if I ever had to, I could probably manage, but it would be a real chore. 

I still read French comfortably, so all is not all lost, but no longer consider myself bilingual.

Except for the census, of course, because being bilingual is a political statement in Canada, and I have papers to prove I’m entitled to use the designation!

**My siblings assure me I'm wrong on this recollection: they took it as well. Both
brothers recall hating Latin as much as I had so I was also wrong to feel uniquely
persecuted! I'm pretty confident, however, that years later, when my dad and I
were both working English teachers, he confessed he could no longer see the point.

Fear: a door into fascism

I was born in 1944 in Occupied Holland, during the last year of the war. My father, who had done his National Service in the Bureau of Statistics because of his Conscientious Objector status, was in hiding for a considerable part of that year because the German army wanted him. Happily, they were unsuccessful, and our little 3-person family was present for the subsequent Liberation by Canadian forces.  (Although my grandparents in Nijmegen were both killed before then by the Allied bombing that made that liberation possible.)

I don’t, of course, remember any of the war, but the familial memory of the time and the events leading up to it are the rock upon which much of my understanding of the world has been built. We haven’t discussed it, but I’d be surprised if that wasn’t also the case for my siblings.

My parents were not the sort of people who tell war stories. That would partly be true because their experiences had been mostly of banal deprivation and loss, punctuated by relatively brief periods of intense anxiety and fear. Mostly, I suspect, they had just muddled through, like most of their compatriots. But two stories from the war have accompanied me throughout most of my life: my dad hiding from the German army, when he knew they were hunting for him, in the pigsty of a neighbouring farm, and my mom recounting the horror she felt when, in the early stages of the war, citizens of Nijmegen, either fearful for their own safety or from personal conviction, turned fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish over to the invaders. A couple of those citizens who just happened to be Jewish had been their classmates.

At the time my parents were very liberal Christians, so much so, I discovered fairly late in my dad’s life, that before the war he had seriously considered studying to be a Minister. The war intervened, but when we moved to Canada and Terrace some years after the war, they sought out the United Church there and became staunch contributing members. That continued when we moved to Victoria, and ended abruptly when my father discovered the new Minister was an anti-Semite. I never learned the particulars, but the family never went back, and as far as I know none of us were ever Christians in that church-going sense again.

None of this is particularly interesting or relevant except that it accounts for my dismay when I read recent Facebook comments to the effect that some correspondents, particularly those already insulated by bodies of water, are so fearful of infection by Covid-19 that they believe their fellow citizens should be forcibly prevented from traveling. (At Easter! Talk about missing the message!)

I wasn’t traveling at Easter, and I won’t be traveling anytime soon but I just know that attitude, the one that says, “you’re not from here, and therefore you’re a danger” is very close to “you’re different, and therefore we should fear you”. It’s a wake-up call to considering where such attitudes potentially lead, and how they cater to that beast that lurks inside us all: the call to authoritarianism, the call to repressing the “other”, the call to our worst instincts, to fascism.

We have short memories, but most of us can remember when AIDS had us in a similar place, and the overt homophobia it engendered. We appear to have weathered that, but many of us can recall the calls to quarantine, to banish, to outlaw.  Indeed there are countries and states and politics that still indulge those fascist inclinations, usually in the guise of religious belief.

So what about people who go to the cottage at Easter? Why are we even worried about them? Why would we assume they are less responsible than we are? If you live in a downtown condo with your two children, have you suddenly lost the right to some down time at your cottage? Have your rights diminished because you don’t live there year round? 

Maybe some people should mind their own business unless they are actually threatened by something other than paranoid fantasy.

I’m not suggesting that Covid-19 isn’t scary. It is, particularly because we don’t know who can spread it. But our health authorities have very deliberately not panicked, and neither should we.
Obviously we should practice social distancing religiously, because we know we will not be infected by a carrier who is 6 feet or more from us. I note that in Campbell River, anecdotally, we’re already very good at this: I have a lung condition which is helped by walking daily. These days there are many other walkers, and they all so far, like me, have been scrupulous about keeping their distance. They even make a point of keeping their dogs away, although dogs really aren’t much of a concern.

We should wash our hands and avoid touching our faces when we have touched something potentially contaminated. I notice that the stores I shop in, nowadays infrequently, are excellent at disinfecting carts, surfaces, etc. They’ve gotten the message, and if they hadn’t I wouldn’t shop there.

Lastly, we should cover our mouths and noses if we think we have any potential of being a carrier. The mask won’t protect us, but it will potentially protect the ones we meet.

If all of us do all those things, we will not be a danger to others and they will not be a danger to us. We will beat this Covid-19, regardless of where we live and work most of the time.

And then, there's that.

That was Week 3, I think.
We're still mostly isolated. But our part of Campbell River appears to be mostly normal. Except for a distinct lack of kids in the park, no discernible gatherings in the neighbourhood, and many more walking couples than usual.
On Tuesday San went to do a grocery run to the Superstore, which is pretty much deserted after 6 when she goes.
On Monday I walked with Geoff as usual, except that we can't break the walk up with an exemplary cup of coffee at the Sundance, because it's closed. (Best Americano in CR!) It's a long walk for Geoff if we can't stop halfway, but the conversation is always good.
On Saturday, it started to hail and then it snowed at our house. (Of course I replaced the winter tires on Wednesday.) Fortunately, it didn't last, and other parts of Campbell River weren't affected at all: Robin and Mike, in Willow Point, were quite surprised to see the amount of snow on our car when I met them to walk behind the airport because they hadn't had any at all.
On Friday I was scheduled to walk with Paul, but had to cancel because I had developed a very sore throat overnight. Also, I thought perhaps I'd lost my sense of taste, because I wasn't getting anything from my morning coffee. And I know the symptoms.
So I went for a long one by myself, and felt much better afterwards.
On that walk I met Rodger and Barbara with their dog, Kona. I know them because Eli and I used to meet them quite regularly, and Kona, like Eli, being mostly husky, was one of the very few dogs we met who understood Eli's insistence on proper Husky Etiquette, and consequently didn't pose a threat. Anyway. I asked them how they were, and they said they'd only just recovered from something unusually nasty, which had all the externals of Covid, but couldn't be proven to be because they'd recovered, and consequently hadn't been tested. But it had laid them very low for over two weeks, and when I saw them was their first walk for some considerable time. Although they were walking, they weren't yet traveling at their usual speed. Kona, however, was just fine, and enjoyed browsing the long grass that was growing beside the road while we talked.
Speaking of Covid, my Twitter feed assures me Prime Minister Boris has been admitted to hospital for "tests"; I'm having to suppress my inclination to schadenfreude, and to hope for a speedy recovery... Though that seems unlikely, given Roger and Barb's experience.
Of course by now everyone knows that Sir Keir is the new Labour leader: my kind of Labour leader, although I could wish for a couple dashes more charisma. But my impression after listening to a couple of the speeches he gave was that he is a distinct improvement over his predecessor, both in policy and presentation. The most important principle of electoral politics is, of course, that a dogmatically correct position is no substitute for being agreeable and flexible enough that people will vote for you.
I'm always surprised when politicians like Corbyn and Sanders (and we've had our share in the NDP!) don't apparently get that.
On Thursday San needed to pick up a couple of exam books at Long & McQuade in Courtenay and I needed to get a prescription at Costco. So San picked up her books (phone ahead to let the sole attendant know you're coming, phone when you get there, stand back from the table in front of the door until the attendant opens the door and places the package on the table, retrieve package) and off to Costco. Room in the parking lot, and a few people at the door. Then a line all the way out the other end of the Costco parking lot and back out to the road. After 15 minutes of it not moving I phoned the pharmacy. No, they couldn't mail the prescription. To access that service you need to order through Costco.ca. But she'd noticed that the numbers fell off considerably towards the end of the day. So I left CR at about 5, zoomed through Costco picking up the entire list except popcorn, and was back in CR before 7. If we need to go back, we know what to do.
And that list of events doesn't even include all the SnapChats and Zoom conversations and...Leanne and Jay's Troops, who came over most days, just to talk for a while, us at the top of our steps and they at the bottom... All much appreciated.

The Press just loves a good "Indian" story

The press just loves a good “Indian” story.

Last year it was the plucky and principled “Indian Princess” Jody Wilson-Raybould, dressed in her First Nations blanket, following “my truth”, fending off the nasty politicians and their minions of the Prime Minister’s office, including the Prime Minister himself! That trope ended badly for our former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General (although she was re-elected as an independent, and is still sought-after copy) and very nearly cost the government re-election. It almost certainly would have, had it not been for an incompetent and insensitive alternative.

This year we have the largely self-styled (as it turns out) “hereditary chiefs” of the Wet’suet’en, marching for the photo op in full regalia down the main street of Smithers BC, willing to engage with any member of the Press at the first sight of a microphone. 

Thanks to the diligence of the Press and their eager informants, we now know far more than almost all of us did before about real and imagined Wet’suet’en cultural practices, the structure of Wet’suet’en traditional society, the economic power of rail blockades, the traditional and ongoing grievances of a very vocal minority of Mohawk, and the abilities of various politicians and police to deal with on-the-ground realities. 

Some of these things are instructive, a few are important, and all of them are interesting. Which I suppose is why some of us still buy newspapers and read them diligently.

Unfortunately -- and this is admittedly very much my own opinion -- much of the information we have been exposed to on this issue is pretty-much irrelevant to the actual issue at hand.

The issue is a natural gas pipeline, the kind that already criss-crosses BC to provide natural gas to BC homes and industry. Here’s the company description: “Coastal GasLink Pipeline Limited is building an approximately 670 kilometre pipeline from the Dawson Creek area to the west coast of B.C. The pipeline will transport natural gas to the approved LNG Canada facility near Kitimat. The approved Coastal GasLink route was determined by considering Indigenous, landowner and stakeholder input, the environment, archaeological and cultural values, land ...” You get the picture; there’s nothing remarkable about this infrastructure, except that the gas is for export and that the line, in order to get to Kitimat, is pretty-much obliged to cross Wet’suet’en territory. 

In the distant past this would not have been an issue: the government would have approved, and the company would have just built the line, possibly consulting the Wet’suet’en bands, possibly not. But in 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in a decision called “Delgamuukw vs British Columbia” declared that the two tribal groups in the area, the We’suet’en and the Gitksan to their north, had aboriginal title to most of their claimed traditional territory. And that changed everything.

What Delgamuukw did not specify, however, was how the various boundary claims would be reconciled, how those decisions would be reached, or by whom. That was left for a future agreement or legal decision. And that part hasn’t happened.

So Coastal GasLink, having made the necessary accommodations with government and the designated regulator, made deals with all the elected bands on the proposed route and started building.

And that’s when the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan, and we were treated to the famous photo op in Smithers. Eight “hereditary chiefs” declared that the bands (that is, the actual Wet’suet’en people and their elected representatives) could only decide for reserve territory; outside of those reserves only the “hereditary chiefs” could give permission. They and their supporters call that “Wet’suet’en Law”. They didn’t give their permission.

To me it’s absolutely mind-boggling how many otherwise rational fellow Canadians saw the logic of this: for example, the entire Green Party of BC got on board! What is it they don’t understand about Canada and democracy? What am I missing?

Because as far as I’m concerned, in a democracy people have a right to have an equal voice, and to make decisions in matters that effect them. And, as far as I know, Wet’suet’en people are Canadians, and, just like me, get to vote in Canadian elections and to participate fully in BC and Canadian institutions. The only difference is that, as aboriginal persons, they have a few extra rights, like the communal rights that come with their traditional territory, among which are the right to be consulted and the right to be compensated.

Those rights have been satisfied, so I’m confident that the pipeline will be completed. 

Of course, for most people who feel passionately about this, it’s not really about the Wet’suet’en and their protection of “the land” at all. It’s about the export of natural gas and the fracking that produces it. Those are real issues, and we shouldn’t pretend natural gas isn’t a fossil fuel, and that producing it and burning it isn’t bad for the environment. They are, and it’s not useful to minimize those facts.

That acknowledged, we also have to note that companies paid many millions of dollars to the BC government for the right to frack in the BC northeast, and to extract the gas. So that’s going to happen; no democratically-elected government could prevent it. We in BC already use about as much of that gas as we can; for example, ours is one of the few houses our neighbourhood that isn’t hooked up. (and we burn wood for heat, so we don’t get to gloat about our environmental superiority) That gas is going to be used somewhere, and so far a lot of it has, ironically, gone at cut-rate prices to the Alberta oil sands to release bitumen from its sand. Personally, I’d rather see it exported, hopefully bringing a better price and more jobs and revenue to British Columbia. 

So there’s that.

The other issue is the “land defenders” argument. I believe it when people say the Wet’suet’en people have a strong connection to their territory. But it’s hardly pristine, as a recent post I found on Twitter of an overflight of the relevant part of the pipeline route demonstrates. There has been intensive logging there for decades. Of course: the access for large parts of it, the pipeline route, in fact, is via the Maurice River Forestry Road. The one the activist blockaded before the RCMP did their duty and took it down.

And that’s where all of this started.

A very Canadian irony

Well, that’s pretty ironic:

— Everyone knew SNC-Lavalin was guilty of fraud, corruption, and bribery. 

— The Prime Minister and his staff couldn’t convince the government’s Justice Minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to issue a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, which would have  fined the company a large chunk of cash but would have allowed it to continue to bid on government projects.

— Wilson-Raybould was removed from her position in the next Cabinet Shuffle and, when she continued to protest, also removed from the Liberal Party. 

— That Party took a significant hit in opinion polls, as did the Prime Minister. 

— The Conservative Party started to smell electoral blood, and in the subsequent election campaign made the Prime Minister’s “failings” a major part of their strategy.

— When the dust settled, the Liberals had formed a minority government and Prime Minister Trudeau was still Canada’s Prime Minister. That government is going to be relying on the NDP and/or the Bloc Quebecois to pass any legislation. Which is potentially, if past history is any guide, the Conservative’s worst nightmare come true.

— Wilson-Raybould was re-elected in her Vancouver seat, but as an independent member of Parliament. This is about as insignificant as possible, and she’s left fighting and losing a battle with the Speaker about offices.

— The Conservatives won the Prairies, but lost almost everything else. Then they lost their leader, who also happens to be Leader of the Opposition.

— SNC-Lavalin makes a deal with the Crown to drop 4 of 5 charges, plead guilty to to one count of fraud, pay a very large fine, and continue to have access to government contracts.

— Which is almost exactly what the purpose of the proposed DPA was. 

—In  fact, the only difference is that now SNC-Lavalin has been officially pronounced “guilty”. 

-- Which, as I pointed out initially, everyone knew all along.

And as is usual in these cases where greed and political advantage intersect, the only winners are the lawyers.

Election 2019: reflections from the actual West

Some time ago we decided that Telus was rich enough and didn’t require the subsidy represented by our landline. So we dropped it, and have reaped benefits ever since, the most recent being that nobody got hold of us to help scrutineer the election results. 

We finally got to watch an election broadcast all the way through!

This was also significant because that watching included, for the first time, our eldest grandchild--just back from watching his dad vote--whose Grade 5 class has been studying the Canadian political system all year. After careful consideration he had decided that he was a “Vert”, but the rest of us, all orange to the gills, didn’t hold that against him: we were just delighted he was so passionate about the process.

Those of you who watched CBC will probably agree with us that, at least until the election crossed the Rockies, the coverage was excellent, and Rosemary Barton was a superb ringmaster. (We especially enjoyed how she managed to keep Andrew Coyne from doing most of his usual Andrew Coyne shtick, but that may be just our household!) 

And then came the results from BC. The Liberals had already been declared minority winners so the tension had pretty-much evaporated and the entire focus appeared to become “how was the returned Prime Minister going to deal with “the West” and its rejection of him?”

Anyway, some reflections on the result:

--The West: I am so tired of Toronto pundits referring to Alberta and Saskatchewan as “the West” that I wrote an (unpublished) letter to the Globe about it: Living, as I do, on an island on the west coast of Canada, I'm getting really tired of Alberta and Saskatchewan, increasingly proving to be very different from BC, constantly being referred to as "the West" in news stories and opinion pieces. What's wrong with "the Prairies"? I would have added, had I thought of it in time, I promise to stop referring to Toronto as “the East” if you stop forgetting BC exists. 

Besides, that characterization of the Prairies as terminally out-of-step with the rest of Canada is seriously defective, although Jason Kenney and Scott Moe would like us to believe it: over a quarter of Albertans voted NDP or Liberal in this election; nearly a third of Saskatchewan voters voted either NDP or Liberal. What’s seriously out-of-sync with the rest of Canada is the temporary and increasingly-illusory pursuit of wealth represented by their petro-economies.

--The Pipeline: Half-way through the election some Conservative activist decided that, should the NDP or Greens be required to prop up a minority Liberal government the pipeline to the Coast was dead. I even saw some NDPers and Greens make the claim. But that’s 100% guaranteed bogus, because if the NDP and Green caucuses (and Bloc, as it turns out) try to leverage their influence that way, Conservatives can be counted on to save it. I simply cannot conceive of Conservatives trying to campaign in a future election on the premise that, because the Liberals had to be defeated they allowed the NDP to kill the pipeline. 

I don’t like it one bit, but the pipeline is a done deal once the court challenge barrier has passed: the government has passed the required legislation, the NEB has had its say, and it cannot be stopped in Parliament. The best we can hope for is stalling until the economics no longer make sense. Although some economists (https://www.nationalobserver.com/2016/10/05/news/nebs-kinder-morgan-pipeline-expansion-boost-based-outdated-info-economist)  (https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/05/31/Kinder-Morgan-Forget-Economic-Windfall/) are already saying that point has been reached.

--Liberals:  Pundits who are determined to see this as an election where everyone loses except the Bloc (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bloc-quebecois-leader-yves-francois-blanchet-emerges-as-the-only/ sorry: it’s behind a paywall) are ignoring some really important facts: yes, Liberals lost their majority, but by fewer than 20 seats; they still have the most seats in Quebec; in BC they had the second-best result in the last 50 years; they won the three largest cities big-time; and they have both the Bloc and the NDP to partner with, which means that they have lots of room to manoeuvre. Liberal Prime Ministers have done very well with minority governments in the past, and I believe this prime Minister is politically smart enough and has learned enough in the past 4 years to be one of the great ones. He probably needs to retain Gerald Butts. He needs to avoid putting rookies in charge of essential portfolios, like, say, Justice. Even if they are female, and aboriginal.

--Wilson-Raybould:  I don’t think Vancouver-Granville did itself any favours on election day. An independent's only ability is to assist her constituents with federal matters, and she's already poison to the bureaucracy and her former party. She may be able to get herself out of this conundrum, but she'll have to modify her natural inclination to intransigence to do it. She'll also have to curb her instinct to be the Member for the AFN, or her constituents, who are not members of the AFN, will tire of her,  her lack of influence, and her inability to “do politics differently” very quickly. 

--NDP: Jagmeet Singh proved to be a considerable voice for the NDP during the campaign. However, there are still major issues to overcome: 

...the Bloc took most of the NDP seats in Quebec and they’re not coming back. There are people who will blame Singh’s turban, but although I believe that’s a factor for a minority of Quebecois who previously voted NDP, it’s unlikely to be the killer. Even Mulcair couldn’t hold the vote, and Mulcair is much more tuned into Quebec and its values than Singh. Layton took Quebec seats because the idea of the “besieged Quebec” surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, collapsed. Bill 21 resurrected that idea, and until it goes away again the Bloc prospers and the NDP loses.

...finances are an issue. Until large numbers of people like us start funding the federal infrastructure and not just local candidates, it will continue to be an issue. I’m prepared to be persuaded, but there are issues to overcome.

...I hope he loses the politics of disparagement. That’s a Conservative/Republican tactic, and doesn’t fit either him or the NDP well. Especially if we mean to influence the agenda.

...So delighted with the Vancouver Island result! Especially Victoria.

--Greens:  They are correct to think that they will not make progress until we get some form of Proportional Representation. The BC and PEI experiences should be instructive in this regard; I wish them well in that campaign. But I deplore Greens putting all their efforts into unseating NDP members (eg Victoria) when their present leader beat Gary Lunn, a Conservative, for her seat. Paul Manley doesn’t count, because his father was an NDP MP, and he actually tried to score an NDP nomination before he was successful with the Greens.

--Facebook and landlines:  After the 2015 election I wrote a blog post in which I covered the influence of Facebook, as we experienced it in that election. (https://occasionaljustus.blogspot.com/2015/10/reflections-on-historic-election.html)

How quickly things change! In this election there was hardly any political exchange between participants on my feed, but there were lots of Conservative ads. I do not know who the Conservatives thought they were aiming at, but the ads were, frankly, a bit of a disaster: repetitive, uninteresting policy statements, ad hominem attacks on “Trudeau”, and never funny or even catchy. The few Liberal and NDP ads were less offensive but not more effective. I’d say that Facebook can stop fretting about influencing anyone politically in Canada.

I’ve already alluded to the other major change, which is the absence of landlines. The traditional phone campaign is clearly dead. Door-knocking, anyone? Apparently not, at least in our riding, where--let’s face it-- because of distances it has never really been much of an influence.

And lastly, 2^nd choice: the Conservatives can attribute their lack of federal election success directly to being almost nobody’s second choice. That's a sure recipe for permanent opposition!

Wasn't that a party?

On the weekend I turned 75. 

How is it that the years have become shorter? It seems only yesterday that, instead of us spending my birthday on the ferry from Bella Coola to Port Hardy we were driving back up that famous hill to the Chilcotin Plateau (wind, apparently prevented the ferry from leaving the dock in Bella Bella) to end the day in a motel in Cache Creek...

Anyway, I’m no longer surprised by turning some age that seemed purely theoretical only a few years ago. And 75 is no longer freighted with the meaning it had when I was growing up, when I literally didn’t know anyone that ancient. Also, I’m getting used to the various minor frailties that appear as one gets older.

But to cut to the chase: when I turned 72 I evidently thought some philosophical comments combined with practical suggestions were in order, so I wrote a blog post about it (https://occasionaljustus.blogspot.com/2016/09/reflections-on-turning-72.html)

I ended that post with the following: 

“7. I think I may break the habits of a lifetime, and throw myself a party when I'm 75.
No I won't: I'll guilt the children into doing it. Surely that's one of the privileges of older age!”

I confess I cannot have been thinking clearly, because, in the heat of the moment I miscalculated: Of course I knew they would eventually read the post, but I guess I assumed that if I didn’t raise the topic, it would go away. Or maybe I would.

In any case it didn’t, and I didn’t, and I should have known better, should have considered the fact that our children have, since they became adults, liked nothing better than an opportunity to mock their parents and their foibles. I should probably have worried. 

By way of example, here’s a little something that Enid dug up for me on the occasion of my 75th. Years ago she and Robin had gone to visit Nora in Istanbul, where she was teaching, and, while there, hiked at least a part of both the Lycian and St Paul’s trails. One night this is apparently what they discussed:

You get the idea.

But it turns out I was right not to worry.

The Troops did organize a party. It was held in the local curling rink. There were no speeches and no presents. (Although I’m left with good number of cards and more than a few bottles of wine!) 

My birthday turned out to be the excuse that brought together literally dozens of people of three generations, most of whom we have known for years, a significant number since they were born. There were friends I had taught; there were friends from out of town; there were friends we know through our children. My brothers both left their islands to attend. 

Leanne had made all the “supercousins”, many of whom are into Harry Potter these days, black capes, so there were flocks of black-robed creatures and their contemporaries flapping and racing around, to the considerable amusement of adults who hadn't seen the flock in action before. We all got to catch up with people we haven't seen in a long time…

It was pretty much perfect.

And I’m very grateful for our exceptional family and our exceptional friends.

Beer

Some years ago when we were both much younger, Grand-dog Eli and I regularly walked one of our favourite logging roads, Pidcock Main, which follows the Oyster River into the foothills. One summer there was logging well beyond what we could reach on foot, and the trucks came by only occasionally, loaded and unloaded logging trucks, and pickups. But mostly, because this road isn’t on the way to anything except bush, we were uninterrupted. 

Which is perfect when you are walking an inquisitive dog who isn’t intuitive about traffic.

The beer cans were obvious, the first time we walked there, probably because there they are, staring at you: shiny and incongruous in the setting. And of course one notices small things when one is walking distances, watching the dog do his thing in the clearcuts, and considering what to photograph. 

Well, to make a months-long story very short, once beer cans intrude on your consciousness, they’re everywhere. I eventually packed out two large shopping bags in one 12-km ramble after they had started to become a bit of a fixation.

And well may you ask, “What do people who toss beer cans onto logging roads drink?” 

In my experience, that depends on where you are and who is doing the tossing, but on the Pidcock Main, in recent times, it was overwhelmingly Bud Lite and Lucky Lager. 

Actually I’m pretty sure, on Vancouver Island at least, Lucky Lager features heavily in most places beer cans are tossed onto roadways. It is a beer that is undistinguished by anything except – correct me if I’m wrong – price. And it is consumed in considerable quantities here.

I must have consumed some in the form of “draft” in the beer parlours of my youth, but I’ve never been much of a beer drinker, and certainly in those beer parlours the ambiance was a lot more interesting than the beer. Lucky is not, in any way, a memorable beer.

I actually remember my first beer. I had it in the officer’s mess of the Bay Street Armories in Victoria in October of 1963, when I was in my first year at what later that year became Uvic. I had just turned 19, which is only remarkable because the drinking age in BC at the time was 21...everywhere except in military establishments where, following Quebec’s lead, the legal age was 19. I had just become an officer cadet in Her Majesty’s Royal Canadian Navy. There was a significant drinking culture among naval officers of the time, but this had very little impact, mostly because, while I was as impressionable as the next apprentice naval officer, I had almost no money and a university education to pay for. But I do remember the terrible beer in Nova Scotia, the first taste of bitters in England, and the temporary joy of drinking Heineken on board ship in Rotterdam, until sea-sickness on the way back to Halifax made that enjoyment impossible.

When I qualified as a teacher Sandy and I moved to Quesnel. The less said about the beer culture of Quesnel in the early 70’s probably the better, so I won’t, except to note that “pounding browns in the Billy B” of a Friday after work was a custom not unfamiliar to members of my staff. We tried making home brew; it was awful. I made wine, which wasn’t good but was at least drinkable, so we went with that. Ben Ginter had a brewery that you could smell all over Prince George at the time (the very brewery featured in that Canadian classic, “Strange Brew”!) but although the beer had character, it was less than good.

And then we ended up in London, on exchange. I taught English in a school in Islington while Sandy got to spend her days with two toddlers in a Council flat that was brilliantly-located near Camden Town, but also cold and damp much of the time and always cramped. My staff had a cadre of “real ale” enthusiasts, who delighted in debating the virtues of various local ales, of which London and its surroundings had many. Every day at noon we trooped to a pub that sold an acceptable ale for lunch; every time there was need of a festivity, the connoisseurs on staff would bring in a keg to try in the 6^th Form suite at the top of the school. I lost track of the number, but do remember that the consensus, at the end of the year, was that the best bitters to be had in London was Young’s from South London. Which was a great pity, because in order to enjoy a pint of Young’s one had to compromise one’s principles: Young’s was known to support right-wing causes, and we were definitely a left-wing staff. 

Unsurprisingly, the pint won out.

The other thing I remember concerning beer in London was the extravagantly-lit and loud pub right across the road from our flat, where the clientele was young and boisterous and drank Carling Black Label, as made in the UK.

In 2006, after I had retired, we returned, without the children (by that time all grown up) to London for a month. We had nostalgically looked forward to pub bitters, and weren’t disappointed: virtually all the pubs we fancied had become Young’s pubs! (And Black Label had become Carling. And the beer was a lot more expensive, but still delicious.) One of our projects was walking down the Thames, over several days, from Richmond to Greenwich, stopping for lunch and a pint at various riverside pubs along the way. Highly recommended; we may have to do something similar in the future.

As I said, I’m normally not much of a beer drinker. Except in summer, when the heat requires a beer. Consequently, I entirely missed the beginnings of the West Coast Craft Ale Explosion. However, at some point well before we were conscious of that explosion, we found we liked Okanagan Spring Pale Ale, and stocked the fridge with that regularly. Then Enid and Isaac moved to eastern Washington State, where summers are frequently intolerably hot; their local Safeway introduced us to the pale ale and IPA of the Deschutes Brewery, and I fear that was the end of Okanagan Spring in our affections. (The fact that they were bought by Sleeman’s which in turn was bought by Sapporo doesn’t help. Given the number of small craft breweries producing excellent beer these days we can be discriminating about corporate ownerships!)

We’re presently in what must surely be a golden age of beer: never has there been more choice; never have those choices been more reliably consistent and true to their promise.  Beach Fire Brewing recently started up in Campbell River, Courtenay has had Gladstone Brewing somewhat longer, Comox has two, Cumberland, Port Alberni, Nanaimo... and literally a baker’s dozen in the Victoria area. (My current favourite is Driftwood’s Fat Tug, but nobody has ever claimed I have impeccable taste, so don’t accept that as a recommendation: I merely mention it to assert my bona fides in this discussion!) And that’s just on the Island. Many of them are available in liquor stores, many can be had on tap in pubs and restaurants. And as Sandy and I proved in our recent odyssey to Ontario and back, there are not very many significant communities in southern Canada or northern USA where it isn’t easy to find a pub or restaurant that serves good food and an excellent ale on tap.

As I said: golden age of beer.

But I also said I’m not much of a beer drinker, and my tolerance for supplying our offspring, their spouses, and their friends (all of whom are enthusiastic beer connoisseurs) is limited. So these days, when we return from Richland we do so not with the 48 permitted bottles of fine beer, but rather with the alternate of 4 bottles of wine. 

Have I ever mentioned that Columbia Valley wineries make some of the very best wine in the world and that one cannot purchase most of it in BC? (And that, in the USA, you can purchase it at Costco as well as Safeway?!)