“
We?” I thought. This SoCred icon and me are now “we”? This was
interesting and I wanted to know what might have caused such a shift.
I suggested we go for a walk and I steered us to the empty waterside
walkway where I was pretty sure we would be alone in the wind and he
might be inclined to tell me what had caused such a conversion in
alliance.
“I like this new life,” I said. “Why should I go back
into the chaos we both know is public life? Why is Campbell, as you
describe, the “worst” government in history?”
He said, “Your
Party and my Party have always fought over who should run the province,
who should work for us, and how much we should pay them. We did not
fight over whose land this was, though, because we agreed, everyone
agreed: It belongs to us.”
“We own it from the electrical power
system to the trees to the bridges and the railroad. Campbell doesn’t
believe what we believed. He believes the idea of public ownership, of
the concept of the Crown, is a failed idea that needs to be dismantled.”
“Your
governments and mine, Corky, were rich or poor according to the price
of what we had to sell, like coal or lumber or electricity or gas.
When prices were good we ran surpluses and people were happy. When
prices were poor we ran deficits and cut services and people hated us.
Campbell doesn’t need to care about the price of what we produce on the
farm. He is selling off the farm, itself, piece by piece, and running
government on the cash flow he gets from the auction of our assets.”
“I
am from the business community; the “old” business community. We like
to build commercial enterprises and make money. We believe in our
right to do work and make a profit. Campbell isn’t interested in
whether or not British Columbia business makes a profit. He is
interested in selling the businesses, not running them. If this is
allowed to continue, both your Party, and the people who do work, and
my Party, and the people who run businesses, will be working for people
we don’t know making decisions we don’t understand because we no longer
own the province.”
I am chagrined to admit that I didn’t believe
my newfound political ally. I had fought his kind all my adult life
and I was not paying much attention to parliamentary affairs. I pretty
much decided he must have been just talking out of sour grapes because
his era in power had been eclipsed and his Party had been destroyed by
Liberals and he missed the limelight. We made small talk for a while
as I led us back to the main street where we had met. We said
good-bye. I returned to my life and my job and the much less lofty
preoccupations that had normally filled my days.
That was four years ago.
Lately,
I have come to understand that I had been given a short course in the
“realpolitic” of British Columbia and I had, at the time, no idea how
real and how wise were the words my former SoCred newfound friend had
spoken.
More and more I think we live in an illusion: a lie, even.
When
I was a kid I was late home from school a lot. I liked to play ball in
the park and I would miss dinner and then make up some story to cover
my behaviour. One night my dad ran out of patience with my excuses and
said, “Corky, if you are going to tell me a lie, don’t tell me a little
one that I can understand and figure out. Tell me a whopper that is
too big for me to comprehend and poke holes in.”
It was many
years before I understood that my dad was really talking about the Joe
McCarthy era he had just lived through, and not my little stories about
why I was late for dinner.
I am reminded of that lecture all the
time now as I realize, more and more, how Campbell has governed and why
my SoCred mentor was so right in his analysis.
Remember those
early years of this century? Remember how we were consumed, sometimes
almost daily, by the savage cuts to seniors’ services and child care
and government workers and every possible sector of human services?
While
we were reeling from change, and two lonely women in the legislature
were trying to hold up the whole sky by themselves, the Liberals were
quietly dismantling the very idea of what “is” British Columbia. And
only now is it even beginning to sink in.
I was stunned into
huge depression last year by my failure to save Formosa Nursery (in
Maple Ridge) from the stupidity of being cut in two by a road that for
40 years has been planned to run next to, not through, their farm.
When
I first met the farmers and saw their trouble, I thought, “No problem.
This is too stupid to happen. We will fix this.” Only after months of
failure to “fix” the mess did it sink in that the road could not be
moved back to where it belonged, even if the municipalities and the ALC
and the Ministry of Highways wanted to move it off the farm, because
the Province had, literally, sold the road to a private company. The
people we trust to run the Province no longer controlled the outcome of
their own decisions.
About the same time as we were dealing with
Formosa, the woman who sells feed for animals in my village yelled at
me that we “politicians” were destroying her business. I told her I
had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that there was
some law that was making it illegal to raise pigs or chickens or cows
for farm gate sale, so her customers weren’t raising animals, so she
couldn’t sell feed and it was “the politicians’” fault.
I told
her, just as I had told Ting and Risa, that I was sure she was wrong
and I would figure out what the misunderstanding was. How could it be
illegal to do what we had always done? If she were right, it would be
like making it illegal to breathe or eat or live.
Sure enough,
it turned out that back in 2003, when nobody was looking, with no
debate, Campbell and the big companies had quietly passed a law, that
would not take effect until after a provincial election (so it could
not become an election issue), that it would be a criminal act to sell
meat to your neighbour.
Then I attended a meeting in Vernon, of
people from the length of the Okanagan from Anarchist Mountain to
Kamloops who were all in a struggle with trespassers digging up their
land and diverting their streams. I learned at the meeting that the
laws of trespass had changed, too, and now it was okay to invade
someone’s property if you had a Free Miner’s permit. This time I was
not so dumb as to say, “This can’t be true” in public, but I thought it
inside my head. When the rules are the rules for your whole life, and
you believe in the rules, it is hard to imagine that we could now be
living under different rules without even knowing what had happened.
(When
my kids were little, I remember attending a lecture on parenting, where
the expert told us: “The way to make your children crazy is to change
the rules as you go along. If the same action on the kid’s part has
different outcomes, they will not have any idea what is okay and is not
okay. They will learn that “authority” is really just power, and the
definition of “Okay” is whatever they can get away with and the
definition of “Not okay” is whatever they get caught at.”)
Then,
last spring, I was asked to visit a farmer in Delta I had known years
ago when we, as government, had returned his expropriated land. The
farmer showed me a letter from BC Rail re-expropriating his land to
accommodate a new port development at Tsawwassen.
It was hard
not to believe him, standing as I was in his potato field and holding
the letter. In this case, something that I had, personally, tried to
make right was being undone to accomplish a massive industrial
development that had, originally, been stopped 30 years ago by Dave
Barrett’s government.
In trying to learn about my farmer
friend’s troubles, I became educated about the Tsawwassen Treaty, the
“Gateway” project to add $7 billion worth of roads (through farmland)
in the GVRD and the plan to pave farmland to make a parking lot for
containers from Asia to accommodate the transfer of goods to big box
stores in Central Canada.
Now my father’s words about the “Big Lie” were coming back to me on a daily basis, sometimes hourly.
Now
we are coming to the part that affects my friends in the Arrow Lakes
Region. A month or more ago, one of you said to me, “There is a rumour
in Nakusp that Pope and Talbot is going to sell their private lands in
TFL 23.” And I said, “That cannot happen. Nobody can sell the private
land component of a contract with the Crown, without breaking the
contract and losing the Crown land.”
For the first week I was so
sure I was right that I forgot to ask anybody what was really
happening. How could I be wrong? I have worked in the Forest Industry
or in Government all of my adult life. This isn’t a case of not
understanding “The rules”. The rules are the same for every rancher
with a grazing lease or logger with a woodlot. If you sell off your
private land, you lose your access to Crown land. Period. Most of
those rules were put in place by Social Credit a half a century ago, to
make an economy and to ensure that both private and public land would
be managed according to some kind of plan and not exploited by any
owner or government.
And then, when the Regional Director and
the Mayor of Nakusp asked me about the same rumour, I wrote to the
Minister of Forests to ask him what was going on. When he didn’t
answer, I began to listen to other MLA’s talking about similar land
sales out of Tree Farm Licenses on Vancouver Island and, together, we
asked questions in the Legislature. Sometimes the Minister called us
“Socialists” for suggesting that legal and social contracts were being
broken. Sometimes he just was absent.
The upshot, of course, is
that we learned that way back in 2003 Campbell changed the rules. Not
for ranchers or woodlot owners or the little sawmills in the area, just
for corporations. Now they can do anything they want. Full stop.
They can sell the private land that they put up to make a contract with
the Crown and the Crown will not withdraw their license to public
land. Worse, their Tree Farm License with the people of BC is no
longer a “right” that they receive as a contract from the people in
exchange for jobs: Now it is a “property”, a “commodity” that they can
sell for money to anyone they want any time they wish.
Do you
begin to see how big this lie is? We, the citizens, have the illusion
that we govern. We citizens have the illusion that we own the roads or
the bridges or the crown land and that we manage those assets through
the Legislature.
British Columbians have the illusion that we
have protection for farmland and we manage that through the
Agricultural Land Commission. We have the illusion that if we buy property we have the right to exclude trespassers. And
those things are all true for [excluding] the little people, the citizens of BC.
They are even true for most of the businesses in BC that my SoCred
friend spent his public life defending.
But they are not true
for the super-rich, the corporate classes of the world who are, now,
invited not so much to invest in BC as to pillage, legally, what used
to be ours.
I want to close this letter with something hopeful. But it is hard and maybe even inappropriate to do so.
Two
friends in the last year have talked to me about hope. The first one
told me that hope and fear are opposite ends of the same emotion. If
you have hope, she said, you will also have fear that your faith may be
false, that you will fail; and fear is a bad place to start anything.
The
second friend said it differently. He said my idea of hope was, in
fact, a weakness because, if events did not unfold in the way that I
“hoped”, I was made sad or angry or depressed, none of which leads to
good leadership.
What I think, today, is that the huge lie that
the Liberals tell - the lie that says that British Columbia is
prosperous and that our prosperity is sustainable (while they sell the
farm) and the lie that we live in a democracy that we control - needs
to be exposed, not by me, but by a thousand thousand conversations
between the people.
I think that historical differences between
old SoCreds and new Greens and New Democrats have to be set aside for a
while as we concentrate on what we have in common as the people who
believe in and used to own this place.
I think the antipathy between union and non-union needs to take a rest while we focus on the rights of citizens.
In
places like the Arrow Lakes, the wedge between those who log (in
Nakusp) and those who work in the mills (in Castlegar) needs to be
replaced with a dialogue about who owns this land and why we made rules
about who holds the right to harvest the bounty of the land.
I
think we need to talk about what a Government “is” before we talk about
“who governs”. Government must be more than just a real estate
function. Everyone who votes has a right to believe they elect a
government, not a lackey to world powers called corporations.
We need dialogue more than hope. We need to see the lie in order to name it and we need to name it in order to talk about it.
I admit that the old SoCred on the street was right. I didn’t understand.
I
admit that I was wrong to promise the farmers in Maple Ridge or the
landowners in the Okanagan or any of you that I could fix what was
broken. I did not even understand the changes: How could I have
believed I could fix them?
We need to get this debate out of the
Legislature and into our homes, churches and halls; and onto the
street. We need to take it back - this province that is ours to manage
for the future - before we raise a generation who didn’t even know we
had it.
Writings 
Dear Friends: Back a few years, before the election of 2005, I was working in the town of Nakusp. Walking down the street one day, I ran into a guy I used to know who has served many years as a Social Credit Cabinet Minister. 
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