From Lennie and Patricia Richard’s YouTube channel:
This is a song Lennie wrote for the third World Acadian Congress held in Nova Scotia in 2004. The aboiteaux were series of dikes and drains that the first Acadians built using the powerful tides to claim many thousands of acres of land in order to survive. The aboiteaux design would allow the moon to pull the water out of the fields on low tide but not allow it to return on the high. Ironic that Acadians themselves were later also pulled from the land with the devastating deportations and not allowed to return. The Acadian Congress gatherings were the first in 250 years to assemble over 200,000 Acadians and their Cajun cousins of Louisiana since that infamous event. The French chorus says: “Open up the Aboiteaux…Let my heart return with the waters.”
Fifty years ago, in the early hours of 17 June 1972, security guard Frank Wills noticed something was wrong at the Watergate office complex. He called the cops and changed history.
Thank you, Frank Wills. If only things had turned out better for you.
While we’re at it, we should remember legendary police reporter Alfred E. Lewis, who called in the story to the Washington Post, including the detail that the accused men dined on lobster at the Watergate Hotel restaurant before the break-in.
If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.
The next time the man on the white horse comes in, he may not be so benign. He could be a real racial hater or a divider of people.
Jim Squires, one-time spokesperson for Ross Perot. Squires made the comment after the 1992 U.S. election, which showed that millions of Americans were ready to go crazy for a thin-skinned, TV-adept billionaire who promised to shake things up in Washington, D.C.
James Ralph was an 18th-century content creator, scratching out a living in England’s New Economy. In an age of political, social and technological upheaval, life could be precarious for those who kept the printing presses stoked with words.
Writing in 1758, Ralph said “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines; but that the former has his Situation in the Air, and the latter in the Bowels of the Earth: Both have their Tasks assigned them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”
The quote comes from The Age of Authors: An Anthology of Eighteenth-Century Print Culture, a remarkable collection of writing about writing and the plight of writers. Editor Paul Keen writes that Ralph was “often dismissed as a Grub Street hack writer,” but managed to produce some important work, including the essay quoted above.
The Distrest Poet, by William Hogarth. [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsThe essay, The Case of Authors By Profession or Trade, Stated, marks the decline of the era when writers relied on patrons. The new commercial model of publishing was generating profits that were being denied to those slaves in the garrets, Ralph argued.
In the new world of letters, anyone, it seemed, could be an author – even women. (Anyone, that is, who belonged to the educated classes. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the literacy rate in Great Britain rose above 60 per cent.)
No one sprouted weird headlines like the Zalm. Last in our series. By Tom Barrett May 14, 2013 TheTyee.ca
Editor’s note: Alas, this is the last of “Some Honourable Members” — the addictive series by Tom Barrett and Tom Hawthorn reliving the most colourfully dubious moments in B.C. political history. Collect all 21 vignettes of shame here!
The Zalm
Bill Vander Zalm thought it would be nice if there were a quiet place in the legislature where folks could get together and pray. It didn’t stay quiet for long.
People complained that the so-called prayer room appeared to be reserved for Christian fundamentalists. Soon members of other faith groups began to show up.
During one lunch hour, a group of environmental protesters, including Muslims, pagans and a Sufi, dropped by and, in the words of Vancouver Sun reporter Keith Baldrey, sparked a “holy war.”
“Tolerance is ignorance!” declared a guitar-carrying fundamentalist.
“Peace is not always tranquility, sometimes it can be more exciting,” a woman replied.
“I heard something about Buddha here, and I didn’t like it,” said the guitar slinger.
“Buddha and Jesus were friends!” shouted a woman.
“Who says?” shouted another.
Wrote Baldrey: “A man watching the meeting from a hallway said between bites on his baloney sandwich, ‘It’s sure not like Sunday school.’”
For Baldrey and the other reporters covering the scene, it was just another day at the office. When Vander Zalm became premier in 1986, the surreal became the commonplace.
The Zalm lived in a castle in the middle of a biblical theme park called Fantasy Garden World. Whatever drifted through his head, it seemed, could pop out as a statement of government policy. And, like some giant weirdness magnet, he attracted strange people of all political types.
It was as if the 1986 election had punched a wormhole through the cosmos that dragged British Columbia into the eccentric orbit of Fantasy World.
Consider Vander Zalm’s trip to the Netherlands to shoot the movie “Sinterklaas Fantasy,” a semi-autobiographical production that, as Vancouver Sun reporter Gary Mason put it, saw the premier “riding a magical frozen rainbow across the world and landing in an Amsterdam canal.” (Well, he did say it was semi-autobiographical.)
Consider the anti-immigration activist and numerologist who claimed to be an economic advisor to the premier. Vander Zalm denied the story and said the paper that broke it should be banned.
Or consider the time Vander Zalm invited the Press Gallery to his office to watch him watch a video called Sex, Drugs and AIDS. The tape, part of a lesson on AIDS being considered by the Vancouver School Board, was a hot topic in the spring of 1987.
The 18-minute video explained how the virus spreads and showed interviews with HIV-positive men and women. Three young women talked about condoms.
Said Vander Zalm: “The part that troubled me most is the subtle message throughout the whole of it, starting from the very beginning, where it says ‘I want to have sex, but I don’t want to die.’” He called it “the longest condom ad I’ve ever seen,” adding: “It’s good for the condom makers.”
As the reporters quizzed him on what he planned to do about the video, Vander Zalm kept repeating the phrase like a mantra: “I want to have sex, but I don’t want to die.”
Whatever the topic, Vander Zalm always had time for the media. A morning news scrum involving the Zalm and the Gallery could last until the TV photographers’ tape ran out and provide enough news to keep reporters writing for the rest of the day.
Following one of these marathons, cabinet ministers would sometimes phone reporters to ask if the boss had invented any new policies involving their portfolios.
The love affair couldn’t last, though. Vander Zalm’s social conservatism upset many voters. His fondness for capitalists who didn’t belong to the Howe Street club peeved the party’s financial backers.
The Zalm era ended with a scathing report by conflict of interest commissioner Ted Hughes, who found the premier had used his office to help sell Fantasy Gardens to Taiwanese billionaire Tan Yu.
Vander Zalm was forced to resign; he was later acquitted of criminal breach of trust. True to the tenor of the Zalm years, the whistleblower who helped bring the premier down was Faye Leung, a realtor with a wardrobe containing several hundred flamboyant hats and a habit of delivering high-speed, high-pitched, high-volume monologues.
As she told Vander Zalm in a taped conversation she later released to the media: “Tan Yu got a good deal, you got a good deal, everybody got a good deal but I got the bum rap.”
Find Tyee election reporting team member and contributing editor Tom Barrett’s previous Tyee articles here. Find him on Twitter or email him.
And luxury resort stays, and non-existent dinners… latest in ‘Some Honourable Members.’
By Tom Barrett TheTyee.ca
Editor’s note: This is the nineteenth in our “Some Honourable Members” series, depicting the more dubious moments in B.C.’s political history, brought to you by veteran muckrakers Tom Barrett and Tom Hawthorn, one a day until election day.
In a time of restraint, Peter Hyndman was a high flyer. Minister of consumer affairs in Bill Bennett’s Social Credit government, Hyndman was an urbane charmer who pundits thought might be the next premier.
As Hyndman’s career was taking off in the early 1980s, B.C. was being walloped by the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Bennett’s response was a highly publicized “compensation stabilization program” intended to hold down government workers’ wages.
But as the government proclaimed its intention to hold the line on spending, Hyndman was having problems with his own government spending. Clerk Alayne Falle had been questioning his expense accounts for months. She spoke to a senior ministry official, who laughed at her concerns. So she began to photocopy Hyndman’s claims.
Several months later, Falle had a cardboard box full of expense claims worth some $10,000. She gave it to her MLA, a New Democrat. The NDP gave it to the Vancouver Sun.
After wading through the documents, the Sun put together a list of questions for Hyndman. Hyndman said he’d be happy to answer them. At the appointed hour, two Sun reporters — Jes Odam and I — showed up in Hyndman’s office. While we cooled our heels in his waiting room, Hyndman slipped out a side door and hustled down to the legislature’s press theatre, where he announced that the Sun was subjecting him to an “arrogant inquisition” that he would have no part of.
“I want the Vancouver Sun to know that I will not be intimidated, that I will not be threatened,” he declared.
Hyndman turned the matter over the auditor-general, Erma Morrison, a move the government felt would be less damaging than calling a public inquiry or referring the matter to the legislature’s public accounts committee.
For the next several days, the Sun printed a series of questions for Hyndman, along with details from Falle’s photocopies. Hyndman had expensed everything, from cartons of milk from the CNIB convenience store on the legislature grounds to a $1,500 stay at a luxury resort in Arizona he said was part of a quest to learn about that state’s legislature.
There was a $61 claim for a dinner with Vancouver Sun publisher Clark Davey that never happened. Hyndman’s story was that he saw Davey walk through a restaurant just as he was paying his bill. He wrote Davey’s name on the back of the credit card receipt as a reminder to give Davey a call some time. Somehow, he said, the receipt was submitted by accident. (He paid the government back for that meal, along with another $265 in mistaken claims.)
For a recession-squeezed public, the item that stood out was a dinner at Vancouver’s Il Giardino restaurant with Hyndman’s wife and two other couples. The bill came to $374, including four bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé wine at $37.50 each — $97 a bottle in today’s dollars.
The auditor-general’s report was tougher than Hyndman had expected. Morrison found he had been “completely oblivious” to public sector expense procedures, and that he had been careless, inept and unbusinesslike.
Hyndman declared he would stay on in cabinet; three-and-a-half weeks later he resigned, saying it was for the good of the government and the Socred party. A week after his resignation, a lengthy RCMP investigation concluded there was no evidence to charge Hyndman with fraud. But by then, his political career was finished.
Find Tyee election reporting team member and contributing editor Tom Barrett’s previous Tyee articles here. Find him on Twitter or email him.
Fighting Joe Martin and his MLA ilk. Latest in our ‘Some Honourable Members’ series.
By Tom Barrett TheTyee.ca
Editor’s note: This is the seventeenth in our “Some Honourable Members” series, depicting the more dubious moments in B.C.’s political history, brought to you by veteran muckrakers Tom Barrett and Tom Hawthorn, one a day until election day.
Even at the best of times, there are more than a few similarities between B.C. politics and a WWE Hell in a Cell cage match. But on some occasions, honourable members have tried to turn the people’s business into a real bare-knuckle sport.
Consider the Brawl in the Hall, when six foot, 210-pound Liberal tourism critic Rick Thorpe threatened to punch out five foot nine, 160-pound then-premier Glen Clark. The two were having a heated discussion outside the legislative chamber when Clark put his hand on Thorpe’s lapel.
“Get your hands off me or you’ll be down, bud,” growled Thorpe.
Clark wisely beat a quick retreat.
As a two-fisted lawmaker, though, Thorpe doesn’t measure up to “Fighting Joe Martin,” who served briefly as premier in 1900.
In 1902, Martin claimed to be leader of the opposition, even though opposition members preferred to be led by Richard (the People’s Dick) McBride. On Feb. 20, when members of the house rose to pray, Fighting Joe slipped into McBride’s chair.
“When McBride sat down, he found himself in the lap of his enemy,” Martin Robin wrote in his history The Rush for Spoils. “Fisticuffs ensued. Smith Curtis grabbed Martin and was seized in turn by Hugh Gilmour. James Hawthornthwaite, the Socialist MLA, incensed at the display of Predatory Capitalism, throttled Gilmour. E.C. Smith of the Kootenay, now witness to a class war, pummelled Hawthornthwaite.
“All the while, the tenacious Martin clung lovingly to McBride’s neck. A legislative stalemate had obviously been reached.”
In any legislative Lethal Lockdown Match, though, the victor might well have been the tempestuous Waldo Skillings, government whip in the days of W.A.C. Bennett. One night, during one of the around-the-clock sittings that Bennett favoured to push through his agenda, Skillings took on an opposition member who was haranguing the premier in the legislative dining room.
As Bennett biographer David Mitchell wrote in a 1983 piece for the Canadian Parliamentary Review, Skillings “slugged the offending member and shoved him down a flight of stairs. Surprisingly unharmed, the Opposition member climbed back up the stairs, kicked Skillings with great force in the shins, then rapidly retreated from the dining room.
“Waldo Skillings, limping, pursued; but, perhaps fortunately, could not catch up with him.”
Waldo Skillings. He was hardcore.
Find Tyee election reporting team member and contributing editor Tom Barrett’s previous Tyee articles here. Find him on Twitter or email him.
Frank Calder’s legacy far eclipsed a night in jail. Latest of ‘Some Honourable Members.’
By Tom Barrett TheTyee.ca
Editor’s note: This is the fifteenth in our “Some Honourable Members” series, depicting the more dubious moments in B.C.’s political history, brought to you by veteran muckrakers Tom Barrett and Tom Hawthorn, one a day until election day.
Around 5 a.m. one April morning in 1973, Victoria police came across a car stopped in an intersection a few blocks from the legislature.
The female driver and her male companion were both drunk. The cops took them to the station and locked them up for the rest of the night. The woman paid a fine; the man was not charged.
A fairly routine event except that the man was Frank Calder, the first aboriginal cabinet minister in Canadian history. He was about to become the first aboriginal kicked out of a cabinet in Canadian history.
Rumours of Calder’s night in jail circulated slowly around Victoria. When then-premier Dave Barrett heard the stories, he phoned Calder at home in northern B.C. In their history of the Barrett years, The Art of the Impossible, Geoff Meggs and Rod Mickleburgh recount one of the more unusual conversations between a premier and a minister of the Crown:
Barrett: “Frank, were you arrested in a car with a woman in the middle of an intersection and were both of you inebriated?”
Calder: “No. That did not happen.”
Barrett then phoned the Victoria police chief. Yes, he said, that did happen. When Calder got back to the capital, Barrett fired him. When he announced the dismissal to the media, Barrett refused to give a reason beyond “I’ve lost confidence in him as a cabinet minister.”
Calder revealed the rest of the story, insisting “this is not Watergate.” Said Calder: “This is not a criminal act. It didn’t involve public funds. As a matter of fact, I paid for my girlfriend’s fine, so what the hell are they worried about?”
Barrett has always maintained that he booted Calder because he denied the incident and not because of the incident itself. Others have wondered whether a non-First Nations minister would have been treated the same way.
There was also the question of Calder’s close ties to Barrett’s bitter New Democrat rival Tom Berger, a lawyer who handled what became known as the Calder case. As president of the Nisga’a Tribal Council, Calder spent years pushing his people’s land claims through the courts in opposition to both Social Credit and NDP provincial governments. A few months before Calder’s dismissal, he and Berger scored a landmark victory before the Supreme Court of Canada that would lead to the first modern First Nations treaty in B.C.
Did any of that influence Barrett’s decision?
In the long run, the incident did nothing to harm Calder’s reputation. He abandoned the NDP in 1975 to run successfully for Social Credit, losing his seat by a single vote — 750 to 749 — in 1979.
In 1988, Calder was named an officer of the Order of Canada. In 2004, he received the Order of B.C. In 2005, the Globe and Mail named him one of the greatest British Columbians of all time. When he died a year later, aged 91, the Victoria Times-Colonist wrote that, “thanks to Frank Calder, ‘Chief of Chiefs’ of the Nisga’a people, British Columbia is a different — and better — place.”
Find Tyee election reporting team member and contributing editor Tom Barrett’s previous Tyee articles here. Find him on Twitter or email him.
B.C. elections tend to be close. Over the last 40 years, only two have been decided by more than 10 percentage points. Only one has been decided by more than 10.1 points.
That’s worth bearing in mind as the election polls tighten. The latest poll, from Ipsos, suggests the New Democratic Party leads the BC Liberals by 10 points. The day before that, an Angus Reid poll suggested the NDP leads by seven points.
It’s a long way to election day, but a 10-point victory would be the third-largest margin of the last 40 years. A seven-point victory would be the fourth-largest in that period.
During the 1960s, W.A.C. Bennett’s Social Credit party beat the NDP three times by a margin of 12 to 13 points. But since the W.A.C. era ended in 1972 with an eight-point victory by the NDP, things have been much tighter.
Here are the results of the nine elections of the last four decades. The table shows the winner’s margin of victory in percentage points as well as the percentage of seats in the legislature the winner took.
Election
Winner
Margin
Seatpercentage
1975
Social Credit
10.09
64
1979
Social Credit
2.24
54
1983
Social Credit
4.82
61
1986
Social Credit
6.72
68
1991
NDP
7.46
68
1996
NDP
– 2.37
52
2001
Liberal
36.06
97
2005
Liberal
4.28
58
2009
Liberal
3.67
58
The median margin of victory for this period is 4.82 percentage points.
The biggest victory by far was 36 points in the New Democrat wipeout of 2001, when voters went to the polls with pitchforks and torches looking to throw the bums out even unto the seventh generation. The narrowest victory was in 1996, when the NDP won with fewer votes than the Liberals. That wasn’t the first time in B.C. history that the party with the most votes lost. In 1952, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation beat Social Credit by four points on the final count, but took one less seat.
As that suggests, in our first-past-the-post system you don’t need to run up a big lead to win control of the legislature. The NDP took more seats in 1996 because their vote was spread more evenly over the province’s ridings, while the Liberal vote tended to cluster in places like West Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
As the table above also shows, the size of a party’s victory doesn’t translate directly into seats in the legislature. It all depends on where a party’s votes are located and the strength of third parties.
The two charts below give a graphic illustration of just how close B.C. elections tend to be. If things get tight on May 14, it won’t be anything out of the ordinary.
Rannygazoo 