A View From Away

SailingOnTheSound
I-5StateOfMindVille

Joel Connelly, the Seattle PI's Environmental Man (and damn fine all-around columnist) weighs in with his view of Mr. Campbell from the outside looking in.

First Connelly lays out the important questions, including the following:

Is the "golden decade" going to make British Columbia an economic powerhouse, cultivating global markets and finally gaining the respect of snooty, far-off Toronto and Ottawa?

Or is it fool's gold, built on privatization, slashed health and welfare services, tax cuts for the rich, and carte blanche for the timber and mining industries to despoil the environment?

In the end, Connelly does not offer definitive answers, but he does show his disdain for one of Victoria's biggest problems, which is not Politicians, but rather Mountains of Shit, and I'm not being rhetorical here:

"With other Canadian cities at last building treatment plants, Victoria may soon be the only major waterfront city in the United States or Canada to discharge all of its sewage raw and untreated. Eleven million gallons gets dumped into the Strait of Juan de Fuca each day."

He then takes note of the fact that Ms. James, unlike Mr. Campbell, has a plan to deal with it all.

But what I find most interesting about Connelly's musings is his take on B.C.'s cuckolded media:

Pro-government news stories and headlines dominate Vancouver's daily newspapers and its top-rated local TV news operation, all owned by the same Winnipeg-based media conglomerate.

"B.C.'s Unemployment Rate Lowest in 25 Years" proclaimed a front-page story in the weekend Vancouver Sun, with a big picture inside showing Campbell in a hard hat.

"Premier Vows War on Crystal Meth," The Province headlined yesterday, picturing a stern-looking Campbell on the front page.

It's a Canadian tradition that even a personally unpopular premier gets reelected if the economy looks good. In British Columbia, the unemployment rate recently dropped to 6.1 percent. Construction employment has reached 173,000 jobs, a record.

And yet ...

The town of Lillooet, on the Fraser River, has seen its forestry office cut from 35 people to five, its courthouse targeted for closure, its Legal Aid office shut down, an elementary school marked for closure and the hospital rumored as a target for downsizing.

Dubbed by opponents "the boy in the bubble," Campbell has waged a stealth campaign. The premier's schedule is announced only hours in advance, to ward off hostile demonstrators."

In short, Connelly is the kind of scribe we need more of here in B.C.

Why?

Because, while he's a reasonable man who can see both sides of the story, he never falls into the trap of giving equal weight to false equivalencies.

Thus, he is always able to make the call if the Emporer's New Clothes are something other than advertised.

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