Councillour Garth Frizzell wrote an open letter to the two mayoral candidates in Prince George asking them what type of leader they would be:
“In Prince George, the Mayor is both the leader of Council, and the CEO of the corporation. Will you be a ‘Council Mayor’ or a ‘CEO Mayor’? A ‘Council Mayor’ is one among nine, whose influence comes not from pre-determined authority, but because they can articulate the issues best, can be influential and compelling. They’re persuasive because they’re competent, have integrity and a clear vision. A Council Mayor recognizes that all members of Council are held responsible, and will stand beside and support colleagues. By contrast, A ‘CEO Mayor’ believes that ultimately s/he is responsible for the success or failure of policies at the City. This attitude is critical in business, where the business’ success or failure can mean the livelihood of a family and the families of employees. The CEO in business is the highest-ranking manager or administrator, and it all falls on his or her shoulders.”
Lyn Hall responded first. An excerpt:
“I think it is evident from what I speak about that I would be a ‘Councillor Mayor’ by your definition. It is imperative that a Mayor treats each Council member as an integral part of the team of nine – because they are. The reality is: elected officials are responsible and accountable to our community both individually and collectively.”
“I suppose I would be a ‘CEO Mayor’. A good CEO builds a strong team and relies on the strengths and input from those team members to move the corporation, in our case the City, in the direction of the common vision. A good CEO helps keep the team focused and steers them back to the important tasks when they become distracted. A good CEO is not dictator, but a team builder and leader that is not afraid to stand up for what they believe in and does not hide behind the team when problems arise. A good CEO leads the company with the best interests of the shareholders, in this case the residents of Prince George, in mind. I am the strong leader that this City needs.”
In a race in which candidates have been described as near-identical, this difference in vision may be something to consider.
I’ve been remiss in mentioning that we had the final council meeting prior to the election last week. Let me remedy that by highlighting a couple of post-mortems that came out this week.
Over at the Prince George Citizen, editor Neil Godbout notes the speeches, applause and tears that closed the meeting, opining:
“Nobody does tributes as well as politicians, particularly when the tributes not only allow them to be gracious but come with the added bonus of patting themselves on the back.”
He also notes that amidst the speeches, there was a deliberate glossing over of the very real conflicts in the council chambers. For example, Brian Skakun:
“‘It’s been an interesting three years with ups and downs,’ he said, summarizing a three years that included him appealing his conviction for violating the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act for leaking a personnel report to the local media, demanding council follow him on his wild goose chase through the city’s expense accounts and the uproar over snow removal and Haldi Road.”
There’s another post-mortem in the form of a podcast featuring Ben Meisner and Elaine MacDonald of 250 News, their sometime contributor Peter Ewart, and Prince George Free Press editor Bill Phillips. At nearly two hours it might seem long, but it’s an excellent overview whether you’ve been following along the whole time or have only occasionally tuned into council news.
Like Godbout, this group makes note of less than harmonious moments among council. They also spend a good amount of time at the twenty-ish minute mark talking about the disconnect between council and city staff. Peter Ewart compared the dynamic between staff and council to the classic BBC comedy Yes Minister.
“Basically what it showed is how administration was always outfoxing the elected representatives and the administration was always getting its way. And there was truth to that.”
For my own take, I’ll simply note that my full-time work in media started shortly before this current council was elected, so the past three years have felt like Introduction to Prince George Politics 101. It’s been interesting to observe the dynamics and attitudes around the council table change, and learn the nuances of city hall over the course of the past three years.
When we head into the next four years, I’ll be following along with more perspective, having one solid term under my belt. It’s been observed that it can take politicians a few years to grow into and understand their role, and I’d wager that holds for the journalists who cover them, too.
I’ll also throw out there that local politics is, no question, a grind. I would like everybody to watch one full council meeting, just to get a sense of what these people are signing up to do every two weeks- and then some, once you throw in budget meetings, committees, and the like. The fact that you’re willing to do the hard work doesn’t give you a free pass, by any means, but it should definitely be noted once in a while.
So there we are, three years down, four more coming up. Who will be talking about in 2018? You decide, November 15 is voting day.
Cripes, and I thought this this Beaverton article was supposed to be a parody.
From Stephen Poloz’s prepared speech:
“If your parents are letting you live in the basement, you might as well go out and do something for free to put the experience on your CV.”
While Poloz lives up the stereotype of the out-of-touch baby boomer, I feel compelled to point out that the young people interviewed in the World Report version of this story (skip to 6:40) live up to the baby boomer’s stereotype of the unemployed twenty-something. A person with a photography degree and an aspiring yoga instructor? Are we sure this whole thing wasn’t written by This Is That?
From CBC this morning, a feature on the 75th anniversary of the National Research Council’s official time signal.
Like Heritage Minutes, I feel like the long dash is one of those insidiously important parts of our culture. Despite having direct access to the official time via my cellphone and computer, I still listen for the long dash to make sure I actually have it right. It’s a sort of secret handshake among Canadians, given meaning by virtue of being broadcast day after day for seventy-five years.
Bonus: listen to the one of the first editions of the long dash, thanks to the CBC Digital Archives. Update: I’m told it’s from 1974.
In my day job I cover some politics, but that coverage is based on what’s of interest to the general public and makes sense in the context of a regional radio show. There isn’t room to delve into interviews with every candidate.
This is where I get into the stuff that’s of interest to me. Maybe only of interest to me. So be it.
I’m going to email the following to all the candidates for mayor and council in Prince George.
I will not be saying one way or another how I feel about the answers I receive. I am simply asking questions. That is what I do in my day job and that is what I will do here. I will share the answers prior to the election. Feel free to use the information provided to make your own decisions, but don’t feel obligated to.
————————————-
Hello candidates,
Thank you for putting your name forward to help lead the city for the next four years. Some of you may know me as a local journalist. Please understand that I am not contacting you as part of my job. I have written these questions in my time off, out of my own interest.
I will be publishing the answers on my personal website. I am doing this so that if other people are interested in the answers they will be able to find them. Sometimes my personal website is cited by other media. It is publicly accessible.
Below are ten questions that I am interested in the answer to. Please answer as best you can. I appreciate succinctness and plain language. If you have written about a subject elsewhere, feel free to provide a link. I will place the link on my website.
I plan to compile the answers I receive and put them up on Wednesday, November 12. I will then put up the rest of the answers as I receive them, up until November 14 at 5 pm.
If you require clarification on any of my questions, please let me know. Again, succinctness is appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
Questions for Candidates
Name: Twitter:
1. What, if anything, would you do to promote bicycling and transit use in the city?
2. Would you rather see small, community parks throughout the city or larger, destination parks in a few centralized locations?
3. You, personally, support a change to the official community plan for a new development or project. Exactly half of the residents in the affected neighbourhood write letters opposing the change. Do you vote for or against the change?
4. What, if anything, would you do to promote the presence of the Lheidli T’enneh culture and history in the city?
5. The language used in city documents – bylaws, official notices, etc – is often difficult to understand. What, if anything, would you do to address this?
6. How do you feel about new subdivisions being created in Blackburn, the Hart, University Way and other non-bowl parts of the city?
7. Where do you stand on breed-specific legislation?
8. What is your favourite book?
9. What is you favourite album?
10. If you were given a grant to bring any event to the city, what would it be? This could be a conference, concert, convention, tournament, or any other event.
A good episode all around, but the first interview with Craig Silverman of Emergent.Info should be required listening for journalists and pretty much everyone else. Delves into a lot of information about how people consume the news online. It also brings up fake news, such as a story about a town in the United States supposedly being quarantined because a family has Ebola.
“A fake story, completely no factual basis for it whatsoever, and they put it out there. And this got interactions- comments, likes and shares- in the hundreds of thousands. And it’s still going. And I found about five or six articles that actually debunked it…. and they had about less than a fifth of shares and interactions with their content.”
Sobering.
Heer Jeet, who inspired my post on Twitter essays the other day, writes a Twitter essay about the Twitter essay:
“The twitter essay is not just a regular essay with numbered sentences broken up into tweets. It is a form with own rules.”
Worth a read. If the Twitter essay is a form (and I’d argue it is), Jeet is the master.
We’re in the middle of the election race for mayor, council, and school board all over British Columbia right now (hey, here’s Daybreak’s election page) but another big election is shaping up. Dick Harris, long-time MP for the Prince George region, recently announced his retirement after 21 years in office.
There are adults who have never known life without Harris is their MP, and for much of this time he went virtually unchallenged. For as long as I can remember this has been considered a “safe” riding for the Conservatives, to the point that sometimes candidates from the other parties didn’t even bother putting up a photo on their election website because they were there in name only, with no expectation of winning. Basically, if you are the Conservative candidate, you will be the MP.
Which makes the race to replace Harris an important one. If history repeats itself, whoever gets the nod could be the local MP for the next two decades. A lot can change, I know, but it does help place the importance of this race in perspective.
We plan to cover the nomination process for this fairly closely on Daybreak. The vote has been called for December 15, and November 13 is the last day people can put their names into the hat. So far the candidates are:
Outgoing Prince George mayor Shari Green is widely rumoured to be entering the race, as well. Just one day after her last night at city council she put out a release that she will be making an “announcement” about the Cariboo – Prince George riding tomorrow. Stay tuned.
When somebody does something bad, there is an inclination to label them a monster.
The problem with that term is it distances us from the fact that these are humans. It also distances us from questions of why humans behave this way.
It’s comforting to “other” people who do wrong because it places them outside the spectrum of humanity. Then you don’t have to ask where you fall on that scale.
I find it far easier to confront the idea that there are monsters among us than the idea that humans do monstrous things.
Good discussion between two political leaders from Prince George and Prince Rupert on the reasons First Nations don’t get involved in municipal politics, and what needs to change to increase interest.
Time to try biking on black ice. May need to get the studded tires out.
Time to try biking on black ice. May need to get the studded tires out.
Speaking of crowdfunded podcasts, if you are a fan of radio or audio at all, I highly recommend checking out the Radiotopia network. I’m a subscriber and regular listener to all seven shows, and I’ve learned a lot about storytelling simply by listening and reading interviews with the people involved. I made a fair-sized donation that I think is a bargain for the enjoyment and information and received.
They’ve already far surpassed their initial goal, but if they manage to hit 20,000 individual donors they get quite a bit more money from a corporate sponsor. So even if you have just a dollar to give, it’s extremely helpful at this point.
Below, I’ve put together a sampling of my favourite episodes of each of these shows. If you like even one, that should be worth a dollar, right?
99% Invisible
“The Sound of Sports” is great. So is “The Modern Moloch“, taking on the myths of car culture. But as an introductory episode, I’m going to go with “In and Out of Love,” an episode about skateboarding that does what this show does so well- make it so you can never look at the world in the same way again. Even if you’re like me and have barely touched a skateboard, after listening to this you’ll be paying attention to the best places to pop an ollie.
Love + Radio
The episode that made me fall in love with this show is “Jack and Ellen” which, to this day, is probably my favourite piece of radio, bar none, ever. But if you’re not ready for experimental, out-there audio, “The Silver Dollar” is a more traditional documentary that is every bit as compelling.
Strangers
You may have heard The Moth Radio Hour when it aired on CBC this past summer. That show was produced by Lea Thau who is now the producer of Strangers, a show that is basically small documentaries about people’s lives. The subject matter can be quite serious, as in “The Long Shadow“, or uplifting, as in my recommended starter episode, “Big Jim and Smokey Joe.”
The Truth
This is a neat one. Every episode is fictional and unfolds as a little radio drama. Hands down my favourite is “That’s Democracy.”
Theory of Everything
This one is tough to characterize. Every week, Benjamin Walker explores a loose theme through first-person narrative, interviews, music, documentary, and fiction, and it’s tough to tell which is which. Each episode is so different it’s tough to say where to start, but I’m going to go with the three-part series “The Clouds” that takes us from Justin Bieber to secret spaces in China to Wikileaks.
Radio Diaries
This is the one that makes me just go “oh my gosh, how do they do that?” The conceit is very simple- tell the stories of regular people- but the execution is just extraordinary. In the Teenage Diaries series the producers sift through hours of tape recorded by teenagers to give us windows into worlds that are unlike anything I’ve heard. Absolutely listen to Josh’s Diary, about a boy with Tourette’s Syndrome, either the original or the one that revisits him 16 years later. Just incredible work.
Fugitive Waves
Beautiful little vignettes with a focus on sound, radio doesn’t get much better than “Cry Me A River.”
Question posed by the show’s Twitter page, with lots of people weighing in. As best I can tell Wab Kinew, Margaret Atwood and Jann Arden are leading the list. So is Norm Macdonald who has expressed interest and would definitely be, well, interesting.
I’ll back Kinew, Atwood, and Arden, for sure. Some other names I’d like to throw into the ring:
So those are my thoughts. If you have your own, let the Q team know.
Update: the official hashtag for this is #QtheFuture and is now extending to segment ideas, theme songs, and more.
The money quote from Toronto Life’s profile of Jesse Brown.
I’ve been following Brown since he was the host of CBC’s Search Engine. When he and the show left CBC and moved to a distributed podcast, I put it up on CFUR Radio and when he started his newest podcast, Canadaland, I was a listener from the start. I also became a Patreon donor shortly before this whole thing blew up. ((Full disclosure: when it became apparent that Brown was in part responsible for why Ghomeshi left CBC but it wasn’t yet clear what exactly he had left for, I did have a “what have I done?” moment. But the rest of the week’s events have eliminated that.))
While he and his show are going to get a lot of attention as the guy who brought down Ghomeshi, I think it’s worth looking at the rest of his work. He isn’t just about taking down the establishment, he is looking for ways to make journalism better. To that extent, his interviews with Michael Enright, Jan Wong, and David Beers (of the Tyee) are well worth listening to, among others. As are more cultural pieces with Kate Beaton and Carl Wilson.
Anyway, back to the quote above. It’s true. Journalism, at it’s purest form, should be about telling people what they don’t know and what you won’t get from press releases. Unfortunately, I do have to recognize myself when Brown says:
“I think that there’s a sense in the press that they don’t want to start something. They want to respond to something.”
A healthy reminder that you shouldn’t always wait for someone else to expose something before reporting on it. Sometimes, you’ve just got to expose it.
Ad nauseam
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November 4 2014 | ∞
You may have noticed me posting more frequently this week. Inspired by Andy Baio, Gina Trapanai , et al I’ve decided to break down the silos of “what belongs” on my blog a little bit. For one, I’m not limiting myself to the maximum of one post a day because I’ve discovered that then I have too much pressure to make “the one” something big and I wind up doing nothing. By contrast, once I break down the walls and open myself up to a paragraph or two I can put a lot more out there.
Manton Reece:
Absolutely.
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