One of the things I like about going to the river is how it’s always changing. Yesterday we went to Cottonwood Island Park and were able to walk far out into the Nechako to the point where it joins the Fraser– the water is low and all sorts of things are being exposed on the river bed.
“You could not step twice into the same river.” – Heraclitus
Fall gets a bad rap, imho. Where I live, spring is often marked by rain, mud and the inability to do much in the outdoors so I’ve never related to the poetry associated with it. Winter and summer I like when the weather is good, but they are seasons weighed down by expectations: will it be sunny today? Will it snow? Plus the pressure to have the time of your life.
Fall has no expectations except to be dreary. A warm day in fall is a bonus, a cool, crisp one is a welcome relief. And this year it’s come with the bonus of finally being able to breathe after an August of smoke, and by the way welcome to all my new subscribers who are here after coming across my post about the depression of living under a cloud of smoke for weeks on end. I don’t always write about the weather.
What else do I write about? Well, since that post I’ve also put together a long one working out my thoughts on whether journalists using social media is good or if it reveals biases that shouldn’t be seen and another on the landscape of the municipal elections in Prince George. And now I’m writing a new newsletter which will also include links to other things I am doing and thinking about.
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House of the Future: Inside B.C.’s first Indigenous-centred public school:
About 12 years, I wrote a university paper on the political decisions behind the formation of B.C.’s first Indigenous-centred public school in Prince George. This week I got to write about it again— now open for eight years, with lessons based in the reality of setting up in a challenged, inner-city neighbourhood. Though I’m happy with the written version, it was originally designed as a short audio documentary so if you are able to I recommend listening to it.
Also from me: I hosted the morning radio show for the last week-and-half and had some interesting conversations. My favourites: the hidden history of Smithers’ ‘Indiantown’ and what it says about racism and reconciliation; Elliott, the ferry-riding deer; Potatoes are awesome.
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Everything Bad About Facebook is Bad for the Same Reason:
There are lots of pieces grappling with the problems of Facebook, but this one by Nikhil Sonnad elevates itself by hitting on the “banal evil” underlying so many of the company’s missteps:
“To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to “people” but to “users,” collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.
“There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.”
I’m still on Facebook, but increasingly only as a tool for connecting to communities as part of my job and not as any sort of personal outlet save what remains the best Rolodex system in existence.
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Toronto built a better green bin and — oops — maybe a smarter raccoon:
This piece by Amy Dempsey is an absolute delight from start to finish. Put in on your Kindle or iPad, print it out, set aside time to just revel in it.
“Long before she tested the bins, MacDonald believed that with every effort we make to thwart the raccoons, we may be helping to make them smarter, creating an uber-raccoon.
“Does that mean, I asked, that they could learn how to breach the bins?
Packing up her scale for the day, MacDonald shook her head no. She watched hordes of them try and fail. Their hands, which lack opposable thumbs, cannot turn the handle. “It’s physically impossible for them,” she said.“‘They won’t learn how to get in.'”
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Robert Munsch’s countless acts of kindness to schools:
Another delight, from Marsha Lederman. I listened to Robert Munsch tapes as a kid, and I love that he’s still connecting with new generations in such personal ways.
A thing that also stood out for me in reading this: the school Lederman profiles is one where over fifty percent of the children are defined as English Language Learning, meaning immigrants or children of immigrants for the most part. In a time when certain people are so concerned about “common values” and “integration” this makes a strong case for public education, literacy and kindness without coming out and saying so.
Connected to that, Sadiya Ansari profiles the Canadian cities “where minorities are the majority” and “everybody fits in.”
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I’ve had this, by Elamin Abdelmahmoud, bookmarked to read for a while. “I wanted you to have my last name. And I wanted it to be a burden.”
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Denise Balkisoon on why a certain subset of journalists/intellectuals are keen to debate people like Steve Bannon on stage:
“Ego: the desire to go head-to-head with infamy, the belief that their personal smarts can’t be outsmarted”
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Those who leave, and those who stay:
I could do without the digressions into who does and doesn’t vote for Trump, but I still found this write-up by Alvin Chang something that’s stuck in my head. He explores various bits of research about small towns in America and the attitudes and circumstances surrounding the people who move on to “better things” (other cities) and those who stick around.
“What they found was that rural communities spent a lot of resources on the achievers — the kids who show promise early on, and are pushed to leave town so they can reach their full potential.
“Ken Johnson, a University of New Hampshire demographer, told me, ‘It’s a theme that runs through a lot of the historical research on rural America. Rural communities lose the cream of the crop — lose the brightest kids — who go away and don’t come back.'”
There’s also a section on viewing those who leave as long-term investments, so long as they come back:
“The researchers learned that these return migrants come back to fill professional jobs that are hard to fill. They come back with life experiences to spur economic growth. And they come back because they care about the people at home.
“‘Those social bonds played a differentiating role,’ Cromartie said.
“The researchers found that almost all the returnees still had family in town, and when they came back, they felt the need to give back to their community with the skills and experiences they accrued elsewhere.”
As the trends towards big cities accumulate, this is going to be an increasingly important conversation.
Here in Canada, this Robbie_Jeffrey piece weaving together the change in rural Prairie towns, farm culture and Canada’s opioid crisis is a beautiful, challenging, necessary read along the same lines. And in Maclean’s, Aaron Hutchins asks “What’s Killing Rural Canada?” writing “The cancellation of milk-running Greyhounds—archaic as they might have been—seemed an emphatic event that cut small-town Canada loose from a country hurtling toward an urban, cosmopolitan future.” All food for thought
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Simon Worral on the usefulness of beavers:
“Beaver ponds filter out pollution, store water for use by farms and ranches, slow down floods, and act as firebreaks. One study… found that restoring beavers to a single river basin produced tens of millions of dollars in economic benefits each year”
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Kanye West and Why the Myth of ‘Genius’ Must Die:
“Killing genius doesn’t rid the world of beautiful ideas; it clears the air for inspiration to take its place. To inspire is, quite simply, to draw breath. It taps into abundantly available resources without draining them. Inspiration doesn’t require unwavering belief, in one’s self or in anyone else. Inspiration, like grace, simply visits us. It is communal and cannot be weaponized.
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Drake may be responsible for 5% of Toronto’s $8.8b tourism economy
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Josh O’Kane’s profile of the Arkells in the Globe and Mail is something I’ve been waiting for. The band has emerged as one of my favourites– possibly the best rock group going right now– and I loved reading about the decision-making and ambition behind their last couple of years of output.
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In Conversation with Billy Joel | Bill Joel, 33-Hit Wonder
Not sure how I wound up down a Billy Joel rabbit hole, but both of these profiles are engaging and entertaining even if you don’t like the music. Maybe even moreso if you don’t, actually– I’m agnostic on the topic. Something about a person who is so critically-unacclaimed having so much success and being so clearly uninterested in simply catering to commercialism at the same time is just fascinating.
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As Germans Seek News, YouTube Delivers Far-Right Tirades. Canada has an election coming up. We’re going to have to understand this stuff. Related thread.
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As Oxford sinkhole grows, it’s like ‘watching a disaster happen in slow motion’. Prince George has a sinkhole right now that’s blocking four lanes of traffic, but this one in Nova Scotia is eating an entire park.
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Social media isn’t a social safety net. The downside of those GoFundMe campaigns.
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Canada’s racist geography and what to do about it by Bashir Mohamed.
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The Water Crises Aren’t Coming — They’re Here
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On treating podcasts as individual episodes, rather than parts of whole that must be consumed in their entirety.
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What happens in a world without middle children?
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If you’ve made it all the way down here, you should watch both Paddington and Paddington 2, as well as Kim’s Convenience now streaming on Netflix. On the listening front I recommended The Dock of the Bay Sessions, a post-humous collection of recordings made by Otis Redding just before his early death– put together as an album and one I’ve had on repeat.
Here’s some fun to round things out:
Thanks for reading!
Municipal election season kicked off today with the official start of nominations being filed and signs going up (although in fewer places than in the past).
On day one in Prince George, there seems to be room for everyone to be acclaimed– two councillors (Jillian Merrick and Albert Koehler) have opted not to run again, and two incumbents have announced their campaigns.
Of the remaining incumbents, we have:
Kyle Sampson and Cori Ramsay are the two newcomers– interestingly, both under 35.
For mayor, so far only incumbent Lyn Hall is in the race.
If that remains the case, it will be the first time since I started covering city politics that there hasn’t been a mayor’s race (and if he wins, it will be the first time in a decade that we haven’t had a new name in the mayor’s position– Colin Kinsley retired in 2008, replaced by former councillor Dan Rogers, who lost to Shari Green in 2011 who herself opted not to run in 2014, the year Hall was elected, defeating past councillor Don Zurowski).
As far as I know, none of the cities in northern B.C. have a mayor’s race set up so far– the incumbents for Quesnel, Terrace, Prince Rupert, Fort St. John and Dawson Creek have all said they will run again, but I’ve yet to see any sign of a challenger. I’m not sure what, if anything, that says about the state of municipal politics in the north.
But we still have ten days left…
Consultant Andrew MacDougall writes in the Ottawa Citizen that journalists are addicted to Twitter and it’s poisoning their journalism:
“It’s a mystery why straight news reporters would want to reveal anything about themselves or their views on public policy. Most politicians already think the press is biased — why risk confirming it for them in real-time?
“They should instead go back to being a mystery. To valuing personal scarcity over ubiquity. To ditching Twitter, and forgetting Facebook. Or, at least limiting appearances there to the posting of their work. They should also say “no” to shouty panel appearances alongside partisans.
“Political journalism is at a crossroads. Reporters need to keep doing their valuable work. But do the work, full stop. Keep your opinions to yourself. More people will believe the good work you do if they have no idea who in the hell you are, or what you think about what’s going on.”
I read this column the same day I read Taylor Lorenz’s piece in The Atlantic on how teenagers’ relationships to the news is changing in the Trump (ie modern) era:
“For ‘non-biased news,’ the teens I spoke to said they turn directly to journalists themselves or news-related pages on social media vetted by people they trust. ‘I follow a few political Instagram accounts,’ [16-year-old] Colin said. ‘They’ll post memes and headlines and stuff and people discuss them. Political Instagram is a thing. It’s sort of like a weird mesh between a meme page and a news page.’
“[16-year-old] Pearson said that he thinks it’s much more valuable to follow individual journalists online than faceless media networks. ‘I put the same weight on tweets from reporters as a story they actually have a byline on,’ he said. ‘If you have a checkmark there’s a lot of credibility that comes with that.'”
So on the one hand, you have an older communications strategist for the former Prime Minister (MacDougall worked for Stephen Harper) arguing journalists should strive for anonymity, limiting your name to appearing on bylines within the publication you work for.
And on the other you have the next generation saying they don’t trust anonymous news organizations and favour personal relationships with journalists via social media.
I don’t know where I fall on this. I do think Twitter and other forms of social media have created an environment in which people feel they need to have hot takes on everything from the latest Trump tweet to the death of celebrities they might not even have a relationship with, and that stepping away from that is healthy, regardless of your profession.
But I’m reticent to extend that all the way to MacDougall’s advice which is, essentially, “never tweet unless it’s a link to one of your articles.”
In trying to work out my feelings on this, I jumped into the archives of the PressThink blog by Jay Rosen. The first post that came up when I typed “trust” and “twitter” in the search bar was his November 2017 post titled Pricing Access to the Trump White House: the Strange Case of the Times’ Social Media Policy. It documents the fall-out after Donald Trump retweeted a video edited to make it look as if Trump was hitting a golf ball into the back of Hilary Clinton’s head and a New York Times journalist tweeting in response, “Classy retweet by the leader of the free world, man with nuke codes, fella who reads TelePrompter on national unity and respect for women.”
The result was the journalist, Glenn Thrush, taking an extended break from the platform and the Times releasing a new social media policy warning its staff against “appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively” and to ask “Could your post hamper you colleagues’ ability to effectively do their jobs?”
“If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.”
So far, so fine, except Rosen digs a little deeper into the meaning behind the overall thrust of the policy:
“I keep coming back to these words: If our journalists are perceived as biased… that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom. Dean Baquet — who approved these words and made them law — doesn’t seem to realize that if the perception of critics can edit the actions of his staff then he has surrendered power to enemies of the Times, who will always perceive bias because it is basic to their interests to do so. This is part of a larger problem in mainstream journalism, which is unable to think politically because it is constantly accused of acting politically by hyper-partisan critics peddling fixed ideas.”
That underlying message is the same one flowing throughout MacDougall’s piece when he writes:
“Why, for example, would a freelance journalist want Conservative leader Andrew Scheer to know that his views on Scheer’s views on government are that they are a ‘ridiculous collection of straw men?’ They might be, but good luck convincing Scheer’s people that anything you ever write will be a fair shake.”
Re-reading this paragraph after reading Rosen’s piece I’m struck by the fact that MacDougall isn’t actually worried about whether this freelance journalist is tweeting something true or not– it’s whether it will make Andrew Scheer happy.
Writing the truth is secondary to the goal of convincing members of a political party that you are unbiased.
Rosen is a vocal critic of this “View From Nowhere” style of journalism. More recently he’s been making the argument for “Show Your Work” which places transparency at the centre of a reporter’s relationship with their audience, rather than the “voice of god” neutrality that’s driven the profession for so long. And one way that more transparent relationship can be driven is through social media.
I sit in an interesting spot in the media landscape. I’m employed by a national organization (frequently accused of bias by people across the political spectrum) but my beat and coverage is very much local.
And I think my position as a person from this place and genuinely interested in its well-being and future as a citizen confers in me a certain amount of credibility within my community.
I’m not often tweeting about U.S. politics because it’s outside my expertise and I have very little to add on the subject, but I will tell you that the inflatable duck from the jacuzzi place knocked out the power last night, just a few hundred meters away from the spot where a giant parrot fell off a local restaurant because of the snow.
This is not all that far from where a giant parrot fell off of Earl's after a heavy snow a few years back. Not a good street for giant birds. https://t.co/vjGl6wtyZq
— Andrew Kurjata 📻 (@akurjata) September 1, 2018
Honestly even if they are five years apart this is still a really centralized area for giant-mascot-bird related mishaps pic.twitter.com/DH1j1Pvp0F
— Andrew Kurjata 📻 (@akurjata) September 1, 2018
btw this sort of depth and context is the sort of thing you only get form having reporters embedded in your communities. please support local journalism
— Andrew Kurjata 📻 (@akurjata) September 1, 2018
That last tweet is obviously somewhat facetious, but it’s also true. Who else but someone who’s lived here would even know that a giant parrot fell off a restaurant five years ago, let alone care to connect it to a power outage from an inflatable duck? And where am I able to share this information on a Friday night outside of Twitter and Facebook?
The power of being embedded within a place shouldn’t be underestimated. Earlier this summer I was off covering wildfires in a neighbouring community and I when people heard I, too, am from a place in north-central B.C. rather than somewhere further afield, I could see people open up to me more, in recognition of a bond that comes from being outside more major centers of power. And I worked sources from Facebook inside of community Facebook groups that I’ve long been a member of, interested in the local yarn shop as much as I am in a state of emergency.
Just over a week ago, the Poynter Institute published an overview of their annual Media Trust Survey which found that after decades of decline, trust in the press is up among Americans, at least. And that’s most pronounced in local news – “76 percent of Americans across the political spectrum have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in their local television news, and 73 percent have confidence in local newspapers. That contrasts with 55 percent trust in national network news, 59 percent in national newspapers and 47 percent in online-only news outlets.”
“The divide in attitudes toward local versus national news is especially pronounced among Republicans: 71 percent said they trust local TV news in their community, 43 percentage points higher than those who trust national network television news. Similarly, 62 percent of Republicans said they trust their local newspapers, 33 percentage points higher than their confidence in national papers. Democrats had high levels of trust across the board.
“The findings are reminiscent of Fenno’s Paradox, the notion that Americans disapprove of Congress, but support their own members of Congress. Just as members of Congress cater to constituents and bring money into their districts, local news tailors its coverage to useful information for local audiences, said Jason Reifler, a political scientist at University of Exeter in the U.K. and a co-author of the Poynter study.”
Circling back to that Atlantic piece on teenagers, it seems as if contrary the potential pitfalls, there can also be real value in using social media as more than a tool for broadcasing your latest byline– by opening yourself up as a bit more of a person to your audience, your audience is more willing to see you as a person they can trust rather than a faceless mainstream media organization they can write off as being biased with an agenda (by the way this is far from a solely right-leaning phenomena, see the NDP’s Charlie Angus’ recent tweets for an example of that).
There was a day when local editorials played a role in local politics.
— Charlie Angus NDP (@CharlieAngusNDP) September 1, 2018
I didn't always agree but I had deep respect for their role.
Then your crew fired local staff and decided that national sun/post media could impose a national right wing voice.
No credibility#notagoodlook
None of this is to suggest journalists shouldn’t think before they tweet (we all should, really). Accuracy and fairness, slippery as they may be, are worth striving for. Nor is any of it to suggest people can’t do their job without social media or that there aren’t those skilled and dropping in to a place, establishing relationships and fairly and accurately reporting on events happening there.
But I would argue that there is also a value to establishing long-term, ongoing relationships with places and people you report on and social media is one place where those relationships can be developed outside of traditional reporting.
When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
I’m writing this on August 19, 2018 from Prince George which, according to the map on my computer, has an air quality index rating of 224 aka Purple aka “Very Unhealthy.”
The Air Quality Index map, giving me a visual representation of air pollution around the world in close to real-time, is one of many maps I never knew I needed four years ago — the first time I first woke up to find the sun blocked out by smoke. Those maps include Emergency Info B.C.’s map of evacuation orders and alerts province-wide, the B.C. Wildfire map and, for the spring, the B.C. River Forecast Centre’s 10-day predictions for which rivers and streams might overflow.
Now I pore over those maps, trying to decipher which way the wind is blowing in the hopes of discovering a patch of land I can retreat to for temporary relief from this smoke: a lake, a river, a mountain somewhere I can breathe.
This weekend that desire drove me somewhere I rarely go for recreational reasons: the mall, with its open space and double doors and frosted overhead windows providing a simulation of being out in the world without actually having to be there. I wondered, vaguely, is this the future? Cheap imitations of the outdoors to sate us when the real outdoors verge on uninhabitable?
Wildfire evacuees line up at the CN Centre in Prince George at 9:30 in the morning as smoke blocks out the sun.
I think to myself, “don’t be alarmist” but then another part of me asks “doesn’t this warrant some alarm?” Maybe the fact I’ve had to keep my windows closed for the entire month of August to prevent ash from drifting into my lungs warrants a little more alarm than I’m allowing myself to feel. Isn’t this exactly what all those post-apocalyptic movies look like? The rich and well-to-do in islands of luxury while the rest languish outside?
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When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
It would be a lie to say it was dark as night, because it was darker than that. Streetlights turned on, but even then visibility was poor. Birds flew low and, weirdly, I heard a rooster crowing in the distance.
Did you see that story about the two men who had to punch their way out of an elevator to escape flash flooding in Toronto?
Waiting for livestock to arrive from the southside of Francois Lake.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but it feels like the magnitude of what we’re witnessing is a little too much to actually take in.
I read an article in the New York Times about “the new normal”. 2018 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record, alongside the previous four– and this without any El Niño to help it along. According to the climate scientists being interviewed, this trend is unlikely to end.
“We haven’t reached a new normal,” Daniel Swain of the University of Los Angele says. “This isn’t a plateau.”
Did you hear that 33 people in Montreal died from this year’s record-breaking heat?
A firefighting camp in Fraser Lake, with crews from around the world.
When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
In an essay I’ve re-read several times this year, the writer Zadie Smith grapples with what it means when we say “the new normal”. She speaks of changing weather in England, but her descriptions resonate with me here in Prince George— no longer being able to count on pleasant days in July, or snow for Christmas.
“We can’t even say the word ‘abnormal’ to each other out loud,’” Smith writes. “It reminds us of what came before.”
What does it mean if this is the new normal? It means that for kids growing up today, summer isn’t just trips to the lake or long nights playing outside. It’s also days on end of being forced indoors as hundreds of evacuees come into your city, pushed out of their own homes by flames— or, worse, being among those pushed away, wondering when or if you’ll be able to return. That’s if things don’t get worse.
Southbank residents climb into motorboats to rescue their belongings after an evacuation order is given.
And it’s not just summer that’s changing. Earlier this year I was shovelling my deck when I was hit by what I can only describe as “pre-nostalgia,” anticipating a time where my shovels may have no practical application— each year there is more rain in winter than Prince George is supposed to have. Daily shovelling is hard work, but I’m glad to have it and the idea of a world where someone living in this place doesn’t have to dig themselves out once in a while as kids slide down snowbanks makes me sad.
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When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
In a few week’s time, fall will be here, and then winter and I’ll have compartmentalized all this away. The memory of driving west toward the fire to witness people, scared, shouting, scrambling to rescue livestock and beloved family possessions after being told to leave their homes, now!, will have faded. I’ll look at this writing and perhaps feel it’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it, because after all things are fine now and my house was never at risk.
But right now I want to remember the number of times people have said the word ‘apocalyptic’ to me in an attempt to describe the scenes they’ve witnessed with their own eyes. I want to remember looking at the darkened sky and thinking that word wasn’t adequate and coming up with another: Biblical.
Mark, 13:24: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light.”
Ezekiel, 32:7: “I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark.”
Acts, 2:20: “The sun will be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood.”
When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
Fort Fraser falls into darkness Tuesday, at 3:30 in the afternoon.
Late last year, Kate Allen at the Toronto Star published a piece called “The Great Global Species Shakeup” that hit me more than any other climate change reporting. Her team illustrated what the predicted 2 to 5 C temperature change over the course of the next few decades will mean for Canada, particularly the boreal zone in which I reside. Shifting poles, an increase in Lyme and other parasitic diseases, but what really got to me was a map showing that the common chickadee is likely to stop living here in my lifetime.
It’s such a little thing, not seeing a chickadee in my backyard, but it’s precisely its littleness that makes it so shocking or, maybe, so easy to understand. The extinction of caribou and raging forest fires are apocalyptic, but the banality of chickadees taking off is more striking, because it is just more imaginable despite the plethora of evidence supporting the other scenarios.
As Smith writes, “It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want get to get out of bed in the morning”.
I see a bit of blue sky poking through the haze. Maybe I’ll venture out for a while. A walk would do me good. We can still enjoy the summer, can’t we? And, anyways, maybe next year will be better.
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When I woke up this week, the sun was blocked out by smoke.
A logging truck exits Fort St. James along Highway 27.
This morning I had a read through the newspaper archives to refresh myself on the history of Pride celebrations in Prince George.
The first Pride parade here was held in 1997. One group that wanted to march was “Changed Pride”, a “Christian” organization for “gays and lesbians who desire to change.” The organizers declined their offer to take part in the parade, and several letters to the editor encouraged them to be more tolerant.
After several years of the mayor refusing to sign any Pride declarations, in 1999 he was away and the acting mayor went ahead and did it in his stead. The next year, the refusal was back and remained in place for several more years.
Prince George wasn’t alone. In Fort St. John, the mayor refused to sign for religious reasons. Terrace did the same. Four councillors in Nanaimo walked out when the mayor made the declaration, and Kelowna’s mayor got the attention of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal for refusing to do the same (in response, he stopped making any declarations).
All of this was in the year 2000. This is not that long ago. I was a teenager and, frankly, this stuff wasn’t on my radar, but as an adult it’s important for me to realize things like the rainbow crosswalk down the street from city hall didn’t come easy to cities like mine.
As a straight dude, it’s easy for me to forget the circumstances for LGBTQ2S+ people, especially those living in smaller places like Prince George and Fort St. John. Tolerance aside, there’s more isolation, there’s fewer opportunities to find romantic partners and there’s the fact that you’re far more likely to have to interact with someone who once held- or still does hold- less than favourable views towards who you are. It’s challenging in ways I can only barely begin to understand.
Driving back into town yesterday, I smiled to see Mr. PG, our city’s lumberjack mascot, holding a rainbow flag. It made me happy to think I lived in a welcoming community.
But that flag, or the one in front of city hall, or the rainbow crosswalk downtown, are not symbols of this city choosing to be tolerant. They’re symbols of the people who refused to let it off the hook for being intolerant, and demanded better.
They– you– made the rest of better. And I thank you for that.
With the exception of a few months in other cities here and there, I’ve lived in the same neighbourhood my entire life. And my entire life, it’s been anchored by what I call the corner store– a series of small shops which themselves are anchored by a small convenience store that sells snacks and basic, slightly more expensive groceries. When I was a kid we would sometimes walk there to get hard ice cream, but they stopped selling that at some point. In high school it was a source of late-night snacks and one Christmas it was the only place in town I was able to find enough brussel sprouts for a dozen people (“you must really like brussel sprouts,” the cashier told me as I filled my bag).
Two years ago, what had previously been a locally-owned and operated store was bought up by 7-11 with promises of it being better than ever. It wasn’t. The overpriced produce was gone, replaced by more packaged snacks. And then, earlier this week, this sign went up in the window.
Decades of survival under local ownership and one of the most pervasive corporations in the world couldn’t find a way to keep this place going for more than two years.
This has been happening steadily my whole life. A few years ago, the pub just behind the convenience store was bought up along with a bunch of other ones around town and, a few years later, shut down along with almost all the rest. It’s never been replaced. There was a bakery and a deli in the complex that are now a pharmacy and some sort of medical office. In fact, that’s been the steady creep at this corner store complex: video stores, craft supplies, a coffee shop move out and various medical businesses move in.
Maybe it makes sense. There’s less kids here than there used to be– my own elementary school is gone. And one of the most significant additions to the neighbourhood is a senior’s home. But there’s also been a steady new creep of family homes and the high school has more students than ever.
The convenience store wasn’t an amazing place. There was no hidden gems, special foods or great deals. But it was in walking distance, and sometimes that’s all you need to help make a neighbourhood feel more like a neighbourhood. I’m sad to see it go.
By no means a perfect movie, Indian Horse is still one of the most powerful films I have seen in a long time. And if you want smaller, Canadian films to come to the city, I recommend showing it support.
This post is spoiler-free until the end, at which point I will have a big warning and paragraph break so you can avoid it until after seeing the movie.
At the end of my screening of Indian Horse, there was silence in the theatre. Even as the credits started to roll, no one got up or started talking. For a minute or two we just sat there, taking in what we had just seen.
By no means a perfect movie, Indian Horse is still one of the most powerful films I have seen in a long time. For almost the whole duration (which I’ll get into in the spoiler section) I was completely in the world. I had genuine smiles of joy at points, and at the end there were tears in my eye. Looking at social media, I see I’m not the only one to have this experience, nor was mine the only theatre that people just sat and took it in at the end.
So, some things if you are on the fence about: it is not a hockey movie, though the trailer frames it that way. But your ideas about sports movies are used very effectively. Nor is it a “residential school movie”, though that is more apt. But I saw a couple of people refer to it as a PSA and I can say it felt nothing like that to me. Speaking as someone who has sat in on Truth and Reconciliation hearings, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry sessions and spoken to survivors of the residential school system, this felt very true to life, and the actors portrayed the range of emotions masterfully. And the small errors I felt were in the film are by no means enough to detract from my overall recommendation.
Also, and this is specifically for those of you in Prince George which is where I saw it: not a lot of people showed up to my screening. This will affect future decisions about whether smaller, Canadian films get a theatrical release here (or other small cities). I’ve done numerous stories on this when people complain about Academy Award-nominees not coming to town– it is based on past performance of similar releases. So the less-than-half-full theatre I went with opening night doesn’t bode well for future chances.
Which is a shame because this is a movie worth seeing on the big screen. I recommend doing so while you have the chance.
OK here come the spoilers!
Last year, I started contributing a column to a biannual arts and culture magazine for northern B.C. titled ‘Thimbleberry,‘ created by Rob Budde and Kara-lee MacDonald. Volume 2 was launched this week and so I am publishing my piece from Volume 1 here.
* * *
When he visited the city of Prince George on the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the late Canadian storyteller Stuart McLean called those of us living here frauds.
“A hundred years of passing yourself off as B.C.’s northern capital,” he said. “When any second-grader could glance at any map and point out that you are indisputably positioned in the southern half of the province.”
His barb was good-natured but not inaccurate. Geographically, Prince George is far more central than northern. It’s a fact I am I reminded of not infrequently as I write stories about “northern British Columbia” for an audience whose members extend to the upper reaches of our province. “Prince George is not northern!” reads more than one email in my inbox.
But what exactly is “north”, anyways?
Like so many things, being northern is less a matter of geography and more a matter of culture and psychology: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
‘What matters here is obviously not the latitude. What really matters is where we’re positioned relative to centres of power.’
“#WeTheNorth” proclaim the Toronto Raptors, despite the fact both the Minnesota Timberwolves and Portland Trailblazers occupy latitudes one and two degrees higher. What really matters is that the Raptors are a Canadian team in an American basketball league and, in our shared psyche, Canada is north of America and much of the rest of the world, even when the geography says otherwise.
The futility of using geography alone to define “north” becomes clear once you look across the country. Prince George, at a latitude of 53.9° N, is defined as part of northern B.C. while Edmonton, at 53.5, is not in northern Alberta. Saskatoon, 52.1°, is classified as central while at 53.8 the Pas, Manitoba is in the province’s north. Then there’s Sudbury: 46.5, further south than even Victoria, and the largest city in Northern Ontario.
What matters here is obviously not the latitude. What really matters is where we’re positioned relative to centres of power. Edmonton is a provincial capital. Saskatoon is the largest city in Saskatchewan. They can’t be north. Sudbury, meanwhile, sits firmly in the southern half of the province, but north of Ottawa and Toronto, the political and economic centres of our country. Once you get beyond those points, you’re in the north, regardless of what a map says.
A corollary of this is the expectation that relative to southern neighbours, the north will simply have less; our institutions will be a little less grand. The word “north” can act as an asterisk: Victoria is B.C.’s capital, Prince George is B.C.’s (northern) capital. Vancouver has the University of British Columbia, we have the University of (Northern) British Columbia.
‘One word may be undermining Prince George’s marketing efforts’
Given that reality, realtor Dean Birks worried our self-classification as northern may be more hindrance than help to our efforts at attracting new residents.
In a 2014 blog post titled “One word may be undermining Prince George’s marketing efforts,” he wrote:
“For the past year… I have asked when talking to people in other major centers like Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa and from out of country if they had a choice to live in the South, Central or North of somewhere what would they choose, given no more explanation than just that,” he wrote. “The choice is almost always South and Central and rarely North.”
Birks suggested that branding Prince George as central rather than northern could help the city become a more attractive location for people whose image of the north is that of a place with harsh climates and few services. Certainly I’ve heard visitors express surprise upon discovering that Prince George is more than a small cluster of buildings in a frozen tundra.
So why do we cling to the designation? In part, I think, because while “north” can be an asterisk it can also be an authenticator.
“The North” occupies a mystical place in our national psyche: the northern lights, the true North strong and free. “Canada’s greatest dreams are to be found in our highest latitudes,” said Governor General David Johnston in 2013.
‘Our authenticity increases with each kilometer we move away from the equator and towards the Arctic.’
Our authenticity increases with each kilometer we move away from the equator and towards the Arctic. We scoff at our fellow countrymen, all sixty-six percent of them, who live within 100 kilometers of the contiguous United States. They may represent the most Canadians but they are not the most Canadian. Being “north” is a mark of our ruggedness and resourcefulness surviving a harsh and unforgiving land, even if that only means we know how to plug in a block heater. It may also be why people in even more northern climes resent Prince George, with its regional hospital, university headquarters, and six-screen movie theatre, trying to pass itself as northern when, compared to them, it is clearly not.
We could give up the word “northern” in an effort at geographical accuracy and to attract more doctors, more students, more retirees, but what would we be giving up? Are we willing to disassociate ourselves from the great Alaska Highway, the North Coast, the generations of stories of Canada as a northern land and us “northerners” as its truest representatives? What work of art was inspired by the central part of anything?
“We sing about the North but live as far south as possible,” wrote journalist J.B. McGeachy over fifty years ago. Like Mr. McLean he recognized the truth of who we are: frauds, but honest ones. We’re torn between the power of the south and the poetry of the north. Neither is quite right, but somewhere between those two we may find our truest selves.
First, a disclosure: I am a relatively early adopter of Facebook both personally and professionally. Definitely not a pioneer, but I was a university student when it first became available to people outside elite institutions and I set up the page for the radio show I currently work for, and do a lot of the posting to it.
And this decision was largely because this is where the people are. I also set up Google+ and Flickr and Soundcloud and Pinterest and Tumblr for the show but they are largely unused (Twitter still is, but not as much) because the audience engagement was found on Facebook.
But does this absolve me of responsibility? With so many eyes on the Cambridge Analytica scandal this week, and the general sense that Facebook is maybe not good for the world bubbling up over the past year or so, I’ve been wondering about the media’s role in Facebook’s rise, and I want to be clear that though I don’t think I likely played any major role in this, I don’t hold myself exempt, either.
I note that even on the Guardian website revealing how personal information was highjacked to influence major elections, readers are still given a “share to Facebook” button on the bottom of the article. I note that in podcasts questioning whether Facebook has spurred on a new dark age of fake news, people are still encouraged to “like” the page in order to get the latest. Media, generally, is deeply embedded in the Facebook ecosystem even as that same ecosystem contributes to outlet after outlet being killed off.
How many people, especially older people, only signed up for an account after hearing their favourite radio host tell them to follow along on Facebook so many times or seeing encouragement to comment not in the letters pages or on the website itself, but over on Facebook? Or being asked to share this important news with their network? From there, how many moved deeper into partisanship or conspiracy based on those algorithms and data targeting? I don’t know, but the possibility troubles me.
The relationship between media and advertisers has always been a complicated one– advertisers pay for journalists, and journalists create a product that contains ads that will be found by audiences. Now Facebook is the newspaper and media outlets are the advertisers, trying to use the platform to get eyeballs. The main difference is Facebook doesn’t pay for this placement, media gives it to them for free because media is used to being the platform, not the product. And in doing so, media surely played some role in helping make Facebook what it is today, for better or worse.
And yes, media is playing a lead role in trying to tell people what that means. But is that enough? Or do we need to embark on some deeper soul-searching in all this?
I’ve been following Zeynep Tufekci’s writing on the intersect between media and radicalization since her piece in the Atlantic on how to responsibly cover mass shootings. Lately, she’s turned her eye to the role of social media and tech company algorithms, such as her recent Wired piece arguing modern free speech accomplishes much the same goals as old-fashioned censorship by overwhelming, misinforming and effectively suppressing truth in favour of propaganda:
“Many more of the most noble old ideas about free speech simply don’t compute in the age of social media. John Stuart Mill’s notion that a “marketplace of ideas” will elevate the truth is flatly belied by the virality of fake news. And the famous American saying that “the best cure for bad speech is more speech”—a paraphrase of Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis—loses all its meaning when speech is at once mass but also nonpublic. How do you respond to what you cannot see? How can you cure the effects of “bad” speech with more speech when you have no means to target the same audience that received the original message?”
And that’s where her latest for the New York Times takes us: into the YouTube recommendations served up to people watching political videos. Tufekci’s research indicates that when watching political videos, people start being recommended conspiracy theories, on the left and right. And it doesn’t stop there:
“Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.
“It seems as if you are never ‘hard core’ enoughfor YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”
I’ve seen this, too. I don’t use YouTube much compared to the average person but I’ve noticed that watching a news piece or too, it doesn’t take long for the recommended videos to be about so-and-so “destroying” or “owning” their political opponents– reporting moving to opinion to tribalism pretty darn fast.
…is when your own website has been giving you so many problems lately. Yesterday I got a message from Google indicating some malicious code had been injected into my blog. It didn’t affect the way visitors saw it, but it was causing the search results to display in Japanese characters for some hotel if you were viewing it through a search engine.
Given various other problems I’ve been having– weird RSS feed behaviour, an inability to properly redirect http to https– I decided to go for a WordPress uninstall and reinstall. First of all, I backed up my site as described here, downloading the entire wp-content folder and sending out an .xml file of my posts, pages and categories.
Then I deleted the thing which, even though I knew it was backed up, was pretty scary. I reinstalled via the Bluehost dashboard, figuring that using their version of the site might help in the future if I had to work with their tech team.
Uploading the wp-content folder back took a while, but went smoothly. The .xml import using WordPress’s built-in tool was a little dicier, because I kept getting a “405 not allowed” error which made it seem like it wasn’t going to work. But, just as I was googling around for a solution, I saw that my page was populating and it looks like everything is here!
The only real problem at this point is the spaces between paragraphs haven’t rendered on all my imported posts and the only solution I’ve been able to find is to manually go in and hit “enter” again. I’ve only done it for posts I’ve written in 2018 plus a few of my more popular back-catalogue ones so far and I’m not sure if I will actually go through the effort of doing it with all the rest at this point.
The good news is the clean reinstall seems to have solved all my other issues– my RSS file is behaving as expected, any attempt to access an http page takes you to the https version of that page, and as best I can tell my site is not advertising Japanese hotels in any way shape or form.
So, what have I learned out of this?
Had I followed these two steps I probably wouldn’t have been having the troubles I have been. So I hope none of this discourages anyone from creating their own blog, but simply acts as a cautionary tale of the steps to take to do it properly!
Whenever I’m sent on an assignment where I’m going to be working outside my comfort zone, I open my podcast app to Howsound, produced by Rob Rosenthal.
Every episode tackles a different area of audio storytelling, from writing to gathering interviews from people who’ve just experienced trauma to structuring a series, always using real-life examples and usually supplemented by interviews with the people who created those examples. I take notes and try to incorporate their tips and ideas into my work.
Howsound is produced in part by Transom.org, which is itself a great resource for learning about the tools and craft of radio, from gear reviews to interviews and essays. I’ve learned a lot from it.
I also like to listen to the workshops that are posted by the Third Coast International Audio Festival , and episodes of Tape.org and Broadcasting Canada, all of which feature some of the best people in the business breaking down their methodology and trade secrets which, of course, aren’t really secrets because it seems like everyone in radio is really generous with their ideas and knowledge.
It reminds me of a quote from baseball pitcher R.A. Dickey I found via Austin Kleon:
“Knuckleballers don’t keep secrets. It’s as if we have a greater mission beyond our own fortunes. And that mission is to pass it on, to keep the pitch alive.“
He theorizes one reason might be that the pitch is so different, which is how I kind of feel about audio producers. There is glamour in creating movies and music, but we gravitate to this world that’s sort of a mix of the two, divorced of most of the celebrity that goes along with it. And all we want to do is pass that pass it on.
Since last Friday, I’ve been reporting on the story of the former mayor of a small town charged with 24 sex-related crimes, which have yet to be tested in court.
The story was broken independently by my own outlet and the Tyee on Friday. Shortly afterward, RCMP put out a media release confirming they had indeed arrested and released the ex-mayor nearly a month earlier, and they were now asking other potential victims to come forward.
Since then, a few people have asked me a variation of the question “don’t police always tell you who’s been arrested?” and the answer is no. They selectively choose which cases they wish to make public based on their own criteria. It’s not just a regular list they send out that media then reports on.
Although crime and court reporting are not my personal favourite things to do, I think it’s important people understand what role journalists, and especially journalists in your community play in letting you when things within the police and legal system happen that you may want to know about.
* * *
Let’s start with the court. A lot of the time, in order to find out what is happening in a case and who’s been charged with what, you need to physically go to a court house to read documents and take notes. You cannot get them emailed to you. They are not posted online.
This is why someone like Mark Neilsen at the Prince George Citizen is so essential. He’s down at the Prince George court house daily, acting as a window into the justice system that doesn’t rely on anyone else to decide what the public finds out about.
Many aspects of what goes on in a trial can only be known by the wider public by having reporters sit in a room for hours at a time taking physical written notes and synthesizing them later for print. You can get rulings, but the nuance and details of testimony come from a person like Mark Neilsen being there day in and day out, acting as your eyes and ears. And fewer and fewer court houses across the country have Mark Neilsens these days.
* * *
It’s the same with crime and emergency reporting. Much of what media– and, by extension, the public– find out comes by listening in on scanners or simply being in the city observing what is going on.
This is why you will see concerns raised by things like every emergency service in the Lower Mainland switching to encrypted channels that the public and media can’t listen in on. While there reasons behind the change, such as protecting patient names and addresses from being broadcast over public channels, there are also potential drawbacks.
For example, CTV News found that if not for media, residents near a large railyard fire in Port Coquitlam would have had to wait longer to find out what was going on:
“Telling residents near an enormous blaze would have been delayed by around 35 minutes if media weren’t able to listen to fire department communication, hear about the disaster, and inform viewers and readers through multiple channels.
“It’s not the only time official news of a major event has been delayed. The official word of the enormous crash on the Coquihalla Highway last week came at 9:16 a.m. – some 13 hours after it happened. It took the Richmond RCMP four days to tell the public about a fatality at a Richmond trampoline park, leaving some customers unaware of what happened.
“All of those events would have generated discussion on first responder radios, which have been monitored by media across North America for decades.”
* * *
I read a joke recently about a small town that had no crime whenever the police communications officer was away. The joke being that the community had no local paper and therefore no one else who was providing this information to the public.
That’s the biggest challenge: we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what crimes aren’t being reported when the media communications officer is away. We don’t know that there is a thirteen hour delay in reporting a major crash until thirteen hours later. We don’t know police have opted not to reveal they’ve arrested the former mayor until media reports it.
They may have perfectly good reasons for all of this. But if we never find out, we never know we don’t know. And the fewer working beat journalists we have across the country, the more likely it is we never find out.
From what I understand of the comics, adult Peter Parker’s biggest problems (aside from having to fight crime) are:
His solution is to get exclusive photos of himself, as Spider-Man, and sell them to J. Jonah Jameson.
The problem with this, as I recall, is it establishes that he has links to Spider-Man, at times putting himself and his loved ones in as almost as much danger as simply publicly admitting he is Spider-Man.
I propose the better solution would be to reinvent Peter Parker as a skilled cosplayer and enter the same appearance circuit as people who have similar body types to Barack Obama and Kim Jong-Un. A few best costume prizes would certainly make some dough, plus you now have a credible reason for traveling with a Spider-Man costume.
Similarly, let’s say a group of wizards wanted to travel through the world of non-wizards more comfortably without arousing suspicion.
A good way to do that might be to write a best-selling book series that spawns a movie, game and merchandising franchise and a dedicated fandom longing to dress, speak and act as wizards. You could start selling wizard candy in human stores and have credible reasons for traveling in large numbers to places where you dress in wizard-style clothes and engage in wizard-like activity.
Heck, make a movie popular enough and you could even start openly identifying as being part of an alien religion on census forms.
Ad nauseam
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