Photo from the Prince George Citizen, April 27, 1961
For context: School name change in Prince George sparks community backlash
First, let’s get this out of the way: Kelly Road Secondary School was not named for John Kelly, at least not directly.
John Kelly did not build the school with his own two hands, nor was it his vision that made sure education came to the Hart. Land was not donated by him. The school was named, as most schools at the time were named, based on its actual, physical location. Just as Peden Hill the school was near Peden Hill the hill and Duchess Park the school adjacent to Duchess Park the park, Kelly Road the school was named to indicate that if you wanted to find it, you would go to Kelly Road. I guarantee you that all of us have given more thought to this school’s name over the past few months than anyone did at the time it was originally created.
That said, there was a John Kelly, the person. So who was he? In the book Prince George Street Names under the entry for Kelly Road he is described as such:
“Mr. Kelly came to Prince George as a surveyor and bought land for the timber, He had a jewelry and watchmaking shop.”
In the entry for Kelly Street, a few more details:
“John C. Kelly, an Englishman, was a jeweller who opened a store on George Street. He is remembered particularly for his generous donations of trophies which are still sought after by local curlers and horticulturalists. The best known of these prizes is the Kelly Cup that is the trophy for curling. In 1934, Mr. Kelly founded the local Horticultural Society.”
And if you look up John Kelly in Prince George: Rivers, Railways and Timber you learn that “One of the city’s most famous curling trophies is the Kelly Cup, donated to the club in 1927 by John Kelly, a jeweller and a sports fan.”
The Kelly Cup still exists, I’ve seen it. It’s rumoured to be the largest curling trophy in the sport. So John Kelly was a downtown businessman who loved sports. His legacy lives on in the trophy that bears his name, as well as two streets — one of which is in the Hart, presumably because it led to the land he bought for timber and surveying. Not as an act of generosity but to make money, some of which he donated to the local sports community.
So we’ve established a bit around John Kelly, and the legacy he secured for himself in the world of curling, a sport he loved, with a trophy provided by him, which is appropriate as he ran a jewelry shop. Searching through the city’s newspaper archives, I’ve been unable to find any direct connection between John Kelly the man and Kelly Road the school, just the fact that the school was built in proximity to a street that had his name. It was about geography.
So let’s talk about geography. The act of naming things is how we tell stories about ourselves. For much of our— settler— history, this was pretty simple. The Moffats live on that street? It’s Moffat Street. That road that takes you to the Kelly land claim? That’s Kelly Road. Or we named things after royals, as members of the British Empire. Or the people who “discovered” them, like the Fraser River.
the school’s current identity
This, of course, ignores the people who were here previously, who’d been using that river for generations and didn’t need anyone to find it for them, who had their own geography and ways of describing the landscape around them to each other. This act of ignoring was predicated on the notion that they weren’t worthy of respect as equals, that our systems and languages and naming conventions were superior. It played out in ways we rightly recognize as wrong today, by burning down homes to make way for a park, preventing Indigenous people who served in the Canadian army in the world wars from receiving the same veteran’s benefits as everyone else, through residential school.
Kelly Road Secondary was not named after deep thought about how it would impact the students or what story it would tell because, at the time, people named schools after the nearest recognizable geographic landmark by people for whom geographical landmarks were largely based around which businessman happened to claim the land. The positive feelings generations of students associate with it is not some magic of the name itself, but because of the meaning their experiences gave the name. I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t love the school just as much had it been called “Hart Highway Secondary” or “Handlen Road Secondary”.
Which is why I’m surprised there are so many who can’t seem to imagine a future where students can love a school with the words “Shas Ti” on the building. Like Kelly Road, Shas Ti tells a story of geography. The difference is that rather than the story of who happened to clear nearby land for timber in the early 20th century, it’s the story of what the land was known for before that. A Dakelh phrase for “Grizzly Trail,” from oral history that this area was once a grizzly hunting grounds. And yes, I know, grizzly bears don’t roam those roads anymore but I don’t think roadrunners, the school’s current mascot in the form of a Warner Bros. knock-off, ever did. Shas Ti connects the school and everyone there not just to an early 20th century history but one that goes back centuries, and tells us more about why people — not just one group of white, European people, but people, humans — came here in the first place. It is rooted to the land and the geography we love, and like all names is ready to take on the meaning of whatever memories we create on the space it occupies.
See also: Hello, Let’s Talk About A Park
When I found out passengers destined for Canada were on-board the crashed flight PS752, the first thing I did was look for the names of my friends among the dead. Seeing none, I reached out to find out if they had been spared the same grief I had. Some had. Others had not.
“It’s like a nightmare,” one told me of his night spent in a group chat as people he knew told him about people they knew who had been lost in the wreckage.
By now, we’ve heard the stories. A family of three from Ajax. A dentist from Halifax. International student returning to studies in Vancouver and Edmonton. Newlyweds.
What strikes me about all of this is that unlike other national tragedies to occur in my lifetime, which have been largely geographically centred, this one has victims across the country. Communities from coast to coast are feeling the loss of friends and neighbours. Every provincial paper and news site seems to have a picture and story about the people in that particular place who are gone. It’s a national tragedy, but also multiple very local ones.
I’ve seen some people mention their social media feeds don’t seem to be reflecting this grief. That has not been my experience. My timelines have been full of personal stories and reaction from people who see themselves in the victims of this tragedy.
To be fair, this isn’t necessarily through some great effort on my part. It’s largely because I went to a university that had enough of an Iranian student community that I happened to be in the same rooms as some of them often enough that we became friendly. They, on the other hand, had gone through a lot to get to Canada: financially, academically, personally. If you’ve never asked someone what it takes to become a member of this country, take the time to learn. It’s an incredible commitment.
The challenges are compounded when your adopted country ceases diplomatic relations with your birth one, and many of the largest airlines and airports on your new continent don’t connect to the place of your heritage. That’s why so many people bound for Canada were connecting to Kiev: the feat of getting from Tehran to Toronto is not an easy one. Imagine loving a place so much you’d go through such lengths just to see it.
Of course when we love a place, what we actually love is its people. It’s difficult to cut ties to a distant country when it contains your aunts, cousins, and grandparents, even as you forge friendships, families and romances half a word away. And love like that is enough to make you want to fly back and forth, even as diplomatic tensions between governing powers rise.
The crash of flight PS752 feels personal to me and to people across Canada because the people on board it were connectors. They were individuals and families who refused to see the world as a place of enemies or civilizational clashes. They built lives and relationships that bridged cultures and continents at a time when doing so feels increasingly difficult. By refusing to give in to fear and paranoia, they made the world feel a little more human. They connected us, in life and — tragically, unfairly, all too soon — in death. How we honour that legacy is something we should take seriously.
I’m 34 going on 35, well past the point where I’m supposed to stop listening to new music, so at this point every year I keep expanding my palette I count as a bonus. I found new music in many ways in 2019: TikTok, Twitter ads, Spotify algorithms, live shows and, yes, the radio. I listen to new stuff in a less completist way than I did in the past, but I still love discovering a new band, track or album that becomes a part of your life.
For ten years now, I’ve been marking my favourite music of the year with a blog post just like this one. It started in 2010 back when I had a campus radio show with a three-part special spanning 41 songs and has followed an incredibly loose structure ever since: in 2011 and 2012 I wrote up my favourite albums, and since then I’ve done playlists ranging in length from 12 to more than sixty tracks.
This year I’m falling somewhere in the middle. First of all, recognizing we all have time constraints I’ve placed my top twelve tracks at the beginning of the playlist (though I haven’t ordered them). If you like those, I’ve got 23 for a total of just over two hours of musical goodness. Said the Gramophone rules apply in that no artist is to appear more than once.
I also had some favourite albums. They are:
You can stream my playlist on Mixcloud and Spotify, or download the mp3. I’ve also linked to individual YouTube videos in this full post.
Previous years: 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2000
Let’s begin the playlist the way I began my year: shivering in Los Angeles in January, fighting a flu. One day I think I stopped in every pharmacy in the downtown area trying to find the right cough drops.
Here come the heavy hitters. Lizzo and Billie Eilish are probably the biggest/breakthrough artists of the year, putting out stellar albums that found mainstream success. Where Lizzo is an accomplished musician and industry veteran putting out shiny, affirmative jams, Eilish is a teenaged Gen-Z’er using ProTools to explore the weirder, darker parts of her mind. What they have in common is a disregard for genre and expectations in favour of their own perspective, and we’re better off for it.
At first I wasn’t sure if Dedicated lived up to Emotion, Jepsen’s nu-pop classic that transformed her from top forty flash in the pan to an underground sensation. But repeated listens have revealed it to be every bit as worthy of a cult-like following, and honestly any of the album’s songs could have been on this list.
5. There Is Probably Fire – Dominque Fils-Aimé
This song is actually part of a three-part suite, but it’s a testament to Fils-Aimé’s talent that songs clearly conceived of in a sequence are completely arresting on their own, as well. Highly recommend checking out her discography.
6. Rebirth – Snotty Nose Rez Kids feat. Tanya Tagaq
What a rise it’s been from SNRK, from Kitimaat village to two-time Polaris Prize nominees, CBC Radio regulars and live show must-sees. Their production and guest spots are stronger now than they were on earlier releases, but their clear love of classic hip hop is still what carries them: dropping references to Outkast, Kendrick and other greats while talking about Indigenous politics in northern B.C. and beyond is the central attraction here.
7. Seventeen – Sharon Van Etten
I love this song the way I love “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and “Wake Up” by Arcade Fire. I love the slow build to an all-encompassing chorus, equal parts mournful and triumphant, that somehow demands you sing along despite being about the passage of time and loss of youth. This is my favourite track of 2019.
Back to Los Angeles now, but it’s not winter anymore. Sticky, sweet and weirdly familiar.
9. This Life – Vampire Weekend
Ezra Koenig has made his love of the Grateful Dead clear on his radio show, which is the only reason I have the Apple Music app at this point, but I didn’t expect that to translate into a Dead-inspired album album suite. Even more surprisingly, it absolutely works.
Rock album of the year. Punk’s not dead.
Britt Meierhofer of Prince George has said she formed Good Egg Records in part to hold herself accountable to a songwriting and recording schedule. A little over a year on, it’s paid off in the form of multiple label releases and live shows, as well as her strongest effort to date: this should be a radio hit, and has been in my head regularly since coming out.
12. Northern Love Affair – Digawolf
A late discovery for me (I literally didn’t hear Digawolf until New Year’s Day) I am in love with the sound of this band, which is part Tom Waits, part northern lights. Tracks on Yellowstone range from heavy rock to ballad, but this tribute to life in Canada’s far north is my absolute favourite, striking a middle ground while somehow being utterly tender and danceable at the same time.
You can’t have an honest year-end review of 2019 in music without Lil Nas X and this sneaky Soundcloud hit. Personally, I still prefer the version unadorned with any country stars or YouTube sensations, just a guy having some fun making music and taking the world by storm as a result.
14. Raven Stole My Wife – Jason Camp and the Posers
A few years ago I wrote about a Haida Gwaii-based punk collective led by SG̲aan Kwah.Agang (James McGuire) of Jason Camp and the Posers, but it wasn’t until this year that I got to see them in action at a sweaty live show that included traditional drumming, a line-dancing lesson and a mosh pit. Concert of the year.
15. Have You Both – Wild Belle
This is one of those songs that Spotify serves up to you, without context, but it still catches your ear.
Ditto.
Named after a Hawaiian beach, Lanikai actually hail from wintery Winnipeg — not that you’d guess it from these summery vibes.
I have a rule that I can never make my year-end music list until after listening to Said the Gramophone’s, because I’ll inevitably find a song I absolutely love on there. Case in point, this celebratory track from Nigeria.
19. Superhero – DJ Shub feat. Cadence Weapon
I enjoy every iteration of Cadence Weapon, but especially when he’s rapping over dissonance, in this case provided by former A Tribe Called Red member DJ Shub.
For whatever reason I think of Toronto as a summer city, and this song, which I discovered via a sponsored Tweet, of all things, help solidify that. “Monetize my pain.”
21. All I Want – Broken Social Scene
In which the supergroup invoke the globe-trotting sounds of Cornershop. Very late-90s-esque.
22. I’ll Be Back Someday – Tegan and Sara
23. Back In Your Head – Hannah Georgas
After crossing over to the dance/pop world in 2013 with Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara explored their indie-oriented roots with Hey, I’m Just Like You, an album of songs they initially wrote back in high school and re-recorded in their earlier style. Meanwhile, Hannah Georgas interpreted their 2009 breakthrough through a pop lens as part of her Imprints EP, which also includes covers of Janet Jackson, the Eurythmics and the Cranberries.
I’ve never made a huge effort to listen to Hinds, a Spansih indie rock group, but every time they pop up on one of Spotify’s algorithmic “for you” playlists, I enjoy them. So I should probably change that.
Another Good Egg signing, and a staple of Prince George’s live scene for years now, Crones put out a proper full-length this year, reprising a number of tracks that were already available, adding new ones and throwing in live favourites like this song, about a detective who surfs.
26. Hold – Clarimont the Second
I’m not actually sure this is a song so much as an interlude, but for some reason I love the whole thing– including the tape click and rolling around the kind of, sort of chorus. I don’t drive around aimlessly at night anymore, but this is what it sounded like when I did.
I have, on various occasions, wondered what happened to Vancouver hip-hop: there was a time when groups from the west coast were as big as anything coming out of Toronto, but ever since Drake, the 6ix has far eclipsed Van City. But it turns out there’s still a scene there, and Filipinix Kim Villagant, otherwise known as Kimmortal, is indication that it’s still worth paying attention.
Remember Ciara? Anyways, she put out an underrated gem this year. Here it is.
One of my favourite artists of 2018, Jessie Reyez laid relatively low this year, but this fourth-quarter ode to long-distance romance is plenty to carry us through to her next proper release.
30. Wishy Washy – Haviah Mighty feat. Omega Mighty
This year’s Polaris Prize winner, my favourite track from Mighty’s 13th Floor is this Caribana-inspired one co-produced by 2oolman of A Tribe Called Red and former Hamilton heavy metal drummer Taabu.
Nobody does laid-back guitar like DeMarco.
It actually took me a while to realize this was a song about colonialism and residential schools, I was just listening to the music. I am not entirely sure how I feel about an anthemic single that centres “genocide” in its chorus — is it the further commodification of other people’s suffering for the benefit of a bunch of white dudes? But here we are.
33. Don’t Know How To Keep Loving You – Julia Jacklin
Hoooo boy it’s time to get depressing on here. This is a devastating song about falling out of love, but one that’s tough to ignore.
34. Nights That Won’t Happen – Purple Mountains
The circumstances of this song, and the death of the person who wrote and performed it, are not things I knew before I heard this track. It’s devastating enough without that context.
35. Rise and Agitate – Amy Blanding
OK, let’s leave things on a more optimistic note. Recorded with a choir female volunteers in a Prince George church/concert space, Blanding provides the message needed to move forward: “Free the river’s flow/Mighty dams will break.”
HONOURABLE MENTION/BONUS TRACKS:
Inevitably, I miss or forget certain songs, so I want to throw a couple honourable mentions in here.
Sunflower – Post Malone, Swae Lee
The first addendum to my list is one that actually should have been in my 2018 playlist, “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee from the Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack. I didn’t manage to see the movie until January, which means I didn’t get introduced to this track until then, which I can’t divorce from my love of the film itself, nor from hearing it blasting out of multiple stores during my aforementioned January visit to California.
The Statistics – Sparks in the Night
I… I don’t know what to say. I had finished uploading my playlist, doing the artwork and writing this post when suddenly I remembered “Wait, didn’t the Statistics put out their album this year?” Yes, yes they did, and the Prince George duo go hard for that radio play with this modern rock anthem.
Saltwater Hank – I’m Going to Throw My Shovel (as hard as I can)
This may go on a 2020 list, depending on whether Jeremy Pahl puts it on a proper release or if he keeps it as Side A of a two-track tree planting EP. Either way: fun song.
Frank Chimero:
“It’s surprising how quickly we consented to reading everything through streams and algorithms, and how ill-equipped we are to emotionally manage it. Everything is slotted alongside anything else, so it is natural to feel like everything is connected, but nothing in the world fits together. We all know how streams and advertising illicit anger through rage mechanics, but less has been said in popular media of how algorithms and big data incite paranoia and magical thinking.”
Also has a section on angry memes supplanting angry music.
Anne Helen Petersen on paying taxes:
“It helps restore busted habitats, and continues work on a project making it so that there’s a trailhead within ten minutes of everyone in the county — not just people who live in the more desirable areas. It’s regrading hills to make trails more accessible. It’s making civilization better, more livable. And I fucking love paying for it. That’s what I say every time I pay my taxes: I love paying for civilization.”
Helena Fitzgerald:
“The things that hurt me at the beginning of this century don’t hurt anymore, or at least they hurt in totally different ways. Perhaps the condition of the future is that it never feels like the future; perhaps in ten years nobody will listen to Maps, or make out in bars anymore, but I hope they do, and if there’s any positive utility to the obligated, eulogizing mood in the current moment as the calendar slams into the brick wall of the new year, it’s this, the stubborn determination to have held something that can be carried forward.”
Since 2011, I’ve been putting together an playlist of my favourite songs from the past year and sharing it here on my blog. I’ll be posting my 2019 list soon, but before that happens I want to do something I haven’t before and travel back in time to a previous era.
It’s 2020 now which means the year 2000 has officially entered the age of nostalgia: as Emily Guskin pointed out on Twitter, if the Wonder Years were to come out now, it would cover the years 2000 to 2005.
This just so happens to mark the era of my musical awakening: from the ages of 15 to 20, I voraciously consumed all genres of music, old and new, as the advent of Napster, Limewire and my own CD burner gave me access to pretty much anything I could imagine, and Columbia House allowed me to get my favourites perfectly legally for a decent monthly fee.
The songs on this list aren’t necessarily the ones I listened to the most in my fifteenth year on earth– in fact, some I wouldn’t discover until later– but they are the ones that still sound good to my 34-year-old ears (January baby), and whose existence helped shape the way I would think about music for the next two decades. Enjoy.
Doing this in chronological order, we have to start with the lead single from “Romeo Must Die”, Aaliyah’s “Try Again” released Feb. 22. A staple of my friend’s basement Napster playlist for the year and my intro to Timbaland.
Also from February, it’s “Fender Bender” from Vancouver’s Kid Koala. I distinctly remember seeing this on MuchMusic and being blown away that this was all done using samples!? “You got another one of those crazy sound effect records you wanna show off?”
“One thing ’bout music when it hit you feel no pain” And thus opened one of the greatest hip-hop songs of all time.
This was originally released in May 2000, though I’m sure I didn’t hear it until later. But when I did, it hit hard– one of the first songs I learned to play on guitar and one of my ways into rock as a tight mess.
I definitely didn’t hear this for a couple more years, but I have to include it here in part because when I got my first cellphone (a candybar Nokia) it was one of my first custom cellphone ringtones.
The “EDIT” breakdown at 1:57 on this dates things a little bit, but honestly, this track– from the “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” OST of all things– still holds up as an R&B/pop song.
I thought for sure that Nelly’s debut single would sound dated, hopelessly latched to the production styles of 20 years ago. But it doesn’t. This could be released today and still hit the same way.
I wouldn’t find the White Stripes until that crazy Lego music video for “Fell In Love With A Girl” came out a couple years later, but once it did I went back to listen to everything else they’d done. This is the highlight of their pre-MTV years.
Forget the Super Bowl. Forget “Conscious Uncoupling”. Forget every bland arena anthem that’s come since. Put this on a mixtape and listen to it in the dark with your eyes closed. Love it like you did when it first came out. It’s worth it.
2000 was the year of the Marshall Matthers LP– “The Real Slim Shady,” “The Way I Am,” “Stan.” It defined the era. But to my ear, this mid-summer single from Eminem’s forbears sounds far more timeless. And dozens of teenagers TikToks agree.
Time for another hop across the pond. I also didn’t expect this to hold up. But it absolutely does.
2000 was the pinnacle of the teen pop era. N*Sync dropped “Bye Bye Bye”, Britney had “Oops… I Did It Again” and Backstreet Boys were still going strong. But the absolute best pop song of the year came from an icon entering her 40s with Ali G at the wheel.
Like Janet Jackson’s track earlier in this list, “Independent Women” from Destiny’s Child is awkwardly tied to a movie soundtrack, even in the lyrics. But the production, the delivery, absolutely overcomes it and belongs alongside Beyoncé’s greatest hits.
OK, summer’s over. Fall is arriving. And we are about to hear the most mind-blowing, weirdest turn for a rock band– maybe ever? It’s time for Radiohead’s Kid A and “Everything In Its Right Place”.
2000 had a lot of artists who could’ve just rested on their laurels doing the work to actually make good music. Anyways, this went on to be a post-9/11 anthem, but it belongs in the year 2000, and all the optimism of that era that was about to be broken.
A love song, a diss track, a club jam, a campfire singalong. From hip hop’s answer to “Kid A” and arguably the greatest record of the next 20 years. It’s Outkast with “Ms. Jackson.”
Released in October in the UK, “By Your Side” by Sade didn’t get its proper North American debut until early 2001. But it’s gone on to be an absolutely timeless love song– one that it’s impossible to cover badly, but also impossible to top the original.
It would be a few years before Canadian indie broke big with the rise of Arcade Fire, Feist, and Broken Social Scene. But the first volley from the Great White North was fired with the New Pornographer’s Mass Romantic. Shoutout to MuchMusic’s “The Wedge”.
If Kid Koala blew my mind with what could be done with record samples in February, by November it was about to be blown apart with the Avalanches and their album “Since I Left You.” The title track sounds like it was released yesterday.
And finally, on November 30, 2000, a pair of French robots sang into 2001 and the new millennium. The past was over. The future was here. Don’t stop the dancing.
Early in 2020, after more than 100 years of operation, Prince George’s oldest department store will be shutting its doors for good.
There are lots of reasons to be saddened by this — just this week I walked in and immediately was helped by a staff member ready to educate me on the merits of different types of fluorescent lights — but right now I’m thinking about the loss of their seasonal window displays. Here’s what’s up right now:
There’s something special about walking down a cold, winter street and seeing warm brightness of a Christmas display window. I’m not alone in feeling this way — here’s Michael Enright from an essay he wrote in 2011 titled “The Magic of the Christmas Store Window“:
“Christmas did not become a real possibility, something that might actually happen, until my parents took me downtown to see the window.
“The window was at the corner of the Simpson’s department store. It was truly magic.”
Prince George is far from the only place to be losing these displays. After 70 years in Montreal, the Ogilvy’s Christmas display has been dismantled and transported to a museum, and the New York Times has been documenting the demise of department store windows for a while.
Of course, we can still buy all the same things, and more, without the department store, both online and in mega-retailers on the edge of town. But it’s not the retail opportunitie that are being lost. It’s the experience of seasonal shopping, the idea that our retail options change with the seasons and that the stores we buy from are in some way connected to our overall community. This is captured well by Matthias Leyerer writing in the The New Conservative (I’ve no idea what the politics of this publication are overall, but Leyerer is also an author at Strong Cities, which is very much focused on urbanism). His piece is titled “A Traditional Christmas Needs A Real Downtown“:
“Whether it’s the constant sale of toys at our big retailers, or the year-round availability of holiday products through the internet, there is nothing actually special about shopping at Christmas…
“The mall and the big-box stores feel even more depressing around the holidays, as you walk through an expanse of parked cars in the cold and snow. There’s no reward for your misery: Target and Wal-Mart still feel the same when you get inside, except that they’re probably more crowded. You’ve been here a thousand times before and you’ll be back next Tuesday to return the gifts you didn’t want and pick up toilet paper.”
A couple weeks ago, I spent a Saturday afternoon browsing through the shops still making a go of it downtown. I met a couple who just opened up a physical store after finding success with online sale of custom shirt prints, I got stocking stuffers for my wife I never would have thought of just browsing online, and I felt like I was experiencing both my city and the season in a way that I never would on Amazon or in Costco. It felt like Christmas.
“The question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.”
Kay explains that there’s a common misconception that if someone loves their job, they would prefer to work instead of doing other activities that contribute to a fulfilling life, which he says can be a slippery slope. “A graphic designer who works for a cool website and gets to make cool art may love their job, but they may not want to miss hanging out at their kid’s softball game over the weekend,” he says. “Forcing them to do more of it assumes it’s more joy for them, when you gotta realize that, like everyone else, they’re trying to balance their lives.”
↑ See that? Since it was published, it’s been one of the most-read stories on one of the most-read news sites in Canada.
The ad for a “HAND Carved Throne” in the pages of the Prince George Citizen is one of those things that people send you every once in a while going “Have you seen this?” It’s a bit of atmosphere to the character of the city, something inconsequential but it becomes a bit of culture.
It was almost ten years ago I first applied for a job at CBC. What excited me was the ability to tell stories about my community. I felt like there’s plenty going on here that’s of interest to people who don’t live here (I feel that way about all communities, btw, but Prince George is mine).
I like doing political and investigative work, and reporting during emergencies is what makes the job vital. But something like this– taking a local yarn about a silly ad in the classifieds, having an excuse to talk to the people behind it, then getting to share it with a national audience– that’s what really makes me love the work.
And seeing it go to the number one spot on CBC.ca overall– one of the most read stories on one of the most read news sites in the country is about the Citizen throne!– is just such a pleasure.
Oh, and listen to the interviews, I implore you.
CBC.ca: ‘You get up. You let the dog out. You get a paper, you make sure the throne is still for sale’
“‘All Star” but it’s a gentle piano ballad, ‘All Star’ but it’s spoken-word slam poetry, ‘All Star’ but it’s a TED Talk) and then the sorts of Dadaist musical experiments (‘All Star’ but every note is C, ‘All Star’ but every word with an ‘E’ is skipped, ‘All Star’ but the lyric ‘And they don’t stop coming’ repeats for 10 hours.”
I’m not sure exactly when I realized that “All Star” had become the Rickroll of the late twenty-teens (I think it was when I saw this video tweeted out), but this piece, and the many links of “All Star” scholarship contained within, is exactly the content I’ve been craving since.
Bashir Mohamed wrote an extended piece on Alberta media’s largely inadequate coverage of a political candidate resigning over what has been repeatedly described as “controversial comments”.
For those who are unaware, the “controversial” comments were blatant white supremacist rhetoric. The following image is from Press Progress.
This is followed by one of the quotes (taken from a leaked Facebook messenger conversation) that caused the candidate to resign, reading:
“I am somehow saddened by the demographic replacement of white people in their homelands — more in Europe than in American — because it’s clear that it will not be a peaceful transition, and partly because the loss of demographic diversity in the human race is sad.”
There has been plenty of equivocating over whether or not the former candidate herself is racist, but there should be no debate over whether this specific comment is. It is very clearly tied to the misguided, pseudoscientific replacement theory favoured by white supremacists as a more academic-sounding way to say they are worried about too many dark-skinned people in white-majority countries.
If you aren’t familiar with this theory and its faults, a good place to start is Farhid Manjoo’s piece in the New York Times titled “The White Extinction Conspiracy Theory Is Bonkers.”
“As a bit of rhetoric, the theory is about as deep as the one pushed by flat-earthers, though without that group’s scientific rigor. White people are not going extinct. As a group, they are only maybe, possibly, becoming a smaller share of the population in the United States and Europe — but how much smaller is a wide-open question among demographers, because the future is unknowable and demography is an imprecise science.
Manjoo goes on to explain why this theory is wrong — the complexity of demographics, the fact that no, white people will not disappear. It’s a good piece. But I think it misses another key element — yes, this theory is bonkers. But even it it weren’t, being worried about it would still be racist.
For this I turn to Doug Saunders of the Globe and Mail, and a very notable exception in mainstream Canadian media’s willingness to take these ideas on head-on (his book The Myth of The Muslim Tide is a well-researched, award-winning refutation of replacement theory well before it was gaining the traction it has today). Here is a key section from his recent column on the notion that white people are being replaced:
“There is no innocent or moderate version of these ideas. The ideas that motivate these killers are often glibly characterized as “anti-immigration.” That is not the point. People hold all sorts of legitimate views about immigration, and believing that it should be slowed or stopped is a valid policy opinion.
“On the other hand, any notion of ‘population replacement’ or demographic ‘invasion’ or ‘genocide’ is not an opinion about immigration at all. It is race hatred.
“There is no other interpretation of those ideas, and there is no moderate or acceptable version of them. If you believe there is something called a ‘Christian civilization’ or a ‘white European people’ or even simply ‘our people,’ and if you believe that your neighbours who are Jewish or Muslim or brown or black are capable of ‘replacing’ it, that means you see your fellow citizens who worship differently or have different skin colours, and their future children, as something permanently other than yourself.
That is the very definition of racial intolerance.”
Back to Bashir Mohamed’s piece: in it, he laments the fact that very few in Alberta media (and Canadian media more broadly) have called the replacement theory comments out for what they are, and instead basically swept it under the “controversial online comments” rug which, hey, who hasn’t been there.
In Maclean’s, Andray Domise grapples with what he calls his own inadequate response to these topics, and that of broader Canadian journalism:
“Again and again this happens in Canada, where political figures and movements flirt openly with the very same white nationalist figures and rhetoric that have been cited by multiple anti-racism organizations as catalysts for the surge in hate crimes and mass violence in recent years. But they are only held to account by journalists for as long as their latest faux-pas can carry a headline. After the news cycle has passed, we’re back to square one. This interminable loop not only puts the onus of writing and talking about this problem on journalists of colour, but exposes us and our communities to the opprobrium, and too often the violence, that is increasingly being legitimized under the shifting auspices of normal political dialogue and free speech in this country.”
My only addendum to all this is I think there is some value in proceeding with caution when it comes to shining a light on these ideas. A piece I think about a lot is this Q&A with researcher Felix Harcourt on how American media covered the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s — in particular the revelation that while newspapers they thought they were exposing the public to just how toxic the Klan was, they were actually helping recruit new members:
Q. So they’re saying, “Here is the Klan’s secret membership application form. Isn’t it terrible that this is what hate looks like in the United States?” and people cut that out of their newspapers and say, “I’m going to join.”
A. Indeed, yes.
And so we go back to Manjoo and Saunders: if we are going to talk about these ideas (and it seems we are, so long as they keep coming into the edges of our mainstream politics), we need to be prepared to not simply give them an airing and assume audiences will understand why these notions of demographic replacement are both incorrect and racist — it is vital that we be prepared to explain that, too.
Reading list:
Ad nauseam
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