Midsummer check-in: Is Prince George the most secretive city in Canada? Is the school board chair jumping ship? Awesome dogs! Awesome flowers! And other news I didn't share
The newsletter paused but the news didn't
Happy Sunday, friends! There’s enough rolling around in my head that I want to get it out so I can go back to enjoying summer/contemplating the existential dread of living in a climate crisis in real-time. So today you get a grab bag of things that I’ve noticed/news developments I want to take note of/half-finished thoughts. The regular posting schedule will return in September.
Hot damn
You can basically walk across the Nechako River right now. Don’t actually try to do this if you don’t have confidence as a swimmer because there are still deep bits and currents but yes, it is very shallow. So are other rivers and lakes, which I’ve been going to to try and beat the heat. Incidentally, this is the year I get a heat pump installed because I cannot abide by the combination of wildfire smoke and 30 C weather and all signs indicate there will be more of it in the future. If you’re pump-curious, here are a couple of good articles about it. Of course, the thing that really changed my mind was visiting homes that have heat pumps and hearing from people who live in them tell me they actually do work and I suspect there will be more of that word-of-mouth spread moving forward, which consumer groups are already seeing. Anyways, if you were curious, according to the CBC Climate Dashboard we’ve had eight days above 30 C this year already when normally there are just three. This humidex projector doesn’t make me feel great, either:
While my household is fortunately in a place to be able to make the changes needed to help mitigate this, a lot of people aren’t, and that’s going to be a bigger and bigger problem moving forward, especially in a city where so many houses were built to withstand extreme cold but not extreme heat.
An exciting opportunity to invest in someone else’s home!
Speaking of real estate, here is the most bonkers rental “opportunity” I’ve ever seen:
Welcome to Mackenzie BC, a picturesque town surrounded by nature's beauty!
This family home presents a unique opportunity for skillеd people.
After unfortunate circumstances with a fire, the property needs some love and attention, making it a perfect canvas for your renоvation ideas. Located near Morfee Lake and scenic trails, this home is waiting for its transformation into cozy and inviting space.Features:
Large 4 bed, 2 bath, 2-floor house.
Spacious 8000 sq ft lot backing onto a serene park with breathtaking sunset views.
Fruit trees in the yard, adding to the natural charm.
Rent this home and take charge of the renоvations.
As the tenant, you'll have the freedom to oversee the project and decide on the materials needed, covering the costs. If required, you will also be responsible for obtaining any necessary permits, ensuring a smooth process.
Rental Terms:
First Year:
First Month: $1500 (plus a damage deposit of $750).
Second Month onwards: Discounted rent at just $200 per month!Second Year: Enjoy further discounted rent at only $350 per month!
Requirements:Prospective tenants must have a proven track record of successful renоvations.
Minimum one-year commitment preferred, with an option to extend.
Must undergo a tenant screening process.
Look at these dogs
I actually saw them running down 5th Ave and wasn’t able to get a pic but fortunately someone else did (and also reported that they were safely recovered by animal control). I hope they are running somewhere safely together, under supervision.
The fireweed is giving me life
"I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't; Not fireweed loving where woods have burn" — Robert Frost, A Passing Glimpse
While the extreme heat and wildfires and smoke have been giving me a sinking feeling, I have been heartened by the mass amounts of fireweed growing throughout and around the city — nature’s first responder, providing help to pollinators and scorched lands after disaster.
Fireweed received its name not because of its brilliant magenta flower or tall flamelike spires, but because it is the first to repopulate burned woodland or a blackened hearth, flourishing on burned-over ground.
— Weed Science Society of America
"In the City of London, parts of which were decimated as a result of the Blitz, open ground was to be seen for first time since the Great Fire of London, 1666.
The bombing of London from the summer of 1940 until March 1945 resulted in the destruction of thousands of houses and many public buildings, opening up land in what had been densely urbanised areas. In the City of London, parts of which were decimated as a result of the Blitz, open ground was to be seen for first time since the Great Fire of London, 1666.Surveys undertaken during the war reveal how quickly the rubble was colonized by plant life, insects and birds. Like the yellow flowering Oxford Ragwort, also depicted in the painting, fireweed flourished as it favours soil that has been subjected to heat. Recorded in 1944 as growing on 90% of London’s ruins, fireweed was described by naturalist R S R Fitter (The New Naturalist. London’s Natural History’, 1945), as the “pioneer colonist of the bombed sites.”
— J. McArthur, When the Fireweed Flowers
Is Prince George Canada’s most secretive city?
At the end fo June, the Canadian Association of Journalists named Prince George the most secretive municipality in Canada, calling it a “continued campaign against transparency paints a troubling picture of a city operating more like some kind of foreign banana republic than a democratically run municipality willing to be held accountable for its actions.”:
The first example focused on the city’s plans to demolish the Moccasin Flats homeless encampment in November 2021. While a court order ruled against the city’s ability to dismantle the homeless encampment due to a lack of suitable living alternatives, the city proceeded to bulldoze part of the camp in violation of the order, which caused significant harm to residents.
…
Second, the Code of Silence jury noted how Kathleen Soltis, then city manager, and senior staff collected overtime pay at twice their hourly rates during the 2017 Cariboo wildfires evacuation crisis. This came after an analysis of the city’s financial statements showed the city manager had restructured the senior management team and given new titles and big pay raises.
…
Third, this year’s jury was troubled by how the city’s manager hid from city council the cost overrun of a local parkade for more than two years. Originally budgeted at a cost of $12 million, city council later found the cost was $34 million.
Now. We can quibble over whether this actually hits the level of a banana republic or truly warrants the city being named the most secretive in Canada, because, to be honest, I’m not sure Prince George really stands apart from the way a lot of public organizations operates. The difference is that in each of these cases, the information came to light because the Prince George Citizen was busy filing Freedom of Information requests.
And not every city has a Prince George Citizen.
It’s also not guaranteed we will, for much longer.
Canada’s broken FOI system
Freedom of Information requests, for those not familiar, are ways for members of the public to get information that governments and other public organizations don’t want to disclose. The process is different from place to place but generally it is time-consuming, costly and it may not actually bear fruit for weeks, months, years — or at all. Prince George actually seems to be pretty decent at responding to FOIs since the Citizen has been able to get this information but I also don’t want to confuse that for transparency — the fact an FOI was needed at all is a mark against that.
But again, I want to put this into a broader context. A little earlier this year, the Globe and Mail did something pretty impressive, which is launch an ongoing project showcasing just how broken Canada’s FOI system is:
A developer from Cornwall, Ont., is perplexed to find that his building permits are suddenly being denied. He files a request under freedom-of-information law for copies of any city records about him or his company. Three months later, he’s told he will need to pay a $1,963.50 processing fee. When he does, he receives pages of mostly blanked-out paper, a full box of his own building applications and files and a note that 3,500 records are being fully withheld.
In Saskatoon, a woman wants to learn about the outcome of a police investigation in which she was a complainant. She submits a freedom-of-information request and specifically asks for a copy of her witness statement, as well as copies of e-mails that she had provided as evidence. In response, the police service refuses to release those records without redactions, because of privacy concerns – privacy concerns about records she supplied.
A wildlife protection organization is skeptical of an Alberta government claim that scores of wild horses need to be culled to prevent ecological damage. They believe the assertion is based on data that was given to the government by a ranchers’ association. The activists request those records, and are told they will need to pay the association for a copy. The price tag: $110,022.15.
Here in B.C., the government recently introduced a fee for filing FOI requests, making the system even more prohibitive to use.
The end of local media
This is happening at the exact same time a huge amount of local media is dying across Canada. It’s pretty bad. Two other newsletter writers did a pretty good job of summarizing it: Paul Wells and Evan Scrimshaw. Let’s start with Scrimshaw’s post:
The death of localism – the fact that of a Montreal Gazette, almost none of it is written by people in Montreal about Montreal, for example – means that nobody in Montreal feels the need to read it as their entity, and at that point the conservative politics alienates a lot of the upper income, high social trust potential readers who think supporting news is a good unto itself.
He goes on to note that a lot of people have offered to pay him for his newsletter — something he isn’t interested in accepting — and which echoes my own experience. I have received a surprising number of offers to pay pretty decent cash for my newsletter which I don’t and won’t accept because 1. it would be in conflict with my real job and 2. I am heavily reliant on the work of media outlets that could use that financial support. But the value I offer, I think, is taking that reporting from disparate sources and snythesizing it into a single package that feels distinctly local. While the Citizen (and My Prince George Now, and CKPG, and the Prince George Post) are regularly reporting and breaking new local stories, their websites are not always a great way to find them. In some cases, the local stuff is buried under provincial and national stories that are interesting but not distinctly local or in others it’s just easy to miss a story if you don’t log on at the right time.
What a daily paper offered — and what I think this newsletter offers — is the opportunity to feel caught up. It comes at an expected time once a day and contains finite information that you could consume in a sitting or two and then have the sense of being informed for the remainder of the day, with the knowledge that you could catch up on new information when the next package arrives tomorrow. That sense of being caught up has steadily been eroded over the past two decades as stories exist as individual units and packages like the daily newspaper or nightly news become less relevant as a result.
This brings us to Paul Wells, who in his series The End of Media has been exploring how politics have both been exploited and harmed by the collapse of newspapers and other traditional news sources. There’s a lot going on but I will assure you it is not simply a lament for the good old days (nor should my post here be taken as such) but it does tie tightly into the theme of transparency and how that concept is being obsfucated in the modern era. Reading it, you can get a sense of how a place like the city of Prince George can simultaneously be engaged in what are really good communications campaigns aimed at talking to citizens about certain topics while also having stuff going on that merits being named the least transparent city in Canada.
All of this is a bit of a word salad but my point is I feel like all of this is linked and while we can quibble about whether our city staff and politicians deserve to be held up as the ultimate example of secrecy, what’s been going on here does point to wider issues that we should all be aware of.
Quick news:
Look, I’m not going to be able to tell you EVERYTHING that has happened but here are the big ones:
The Prince George school board chair Rachel Weber who, having run largely unopposed in Mackenzie has only ever received a handful of votes, is mounting a campaign to join the B.C. Conservative Party which is now helmed by a former Prince George MLA John Rustad who was kicked out of the B.C. Liberals (now B.C. United) after repeatedly questioning the science of climate change (not to mention vaccines). She says she’s committed to fulfilling her role on the board but given everything I continue to wonder how long the other board members will want Weber to be their spokesperson — especially if she has her eyes elsewhere.
Speaking of school board politics, Cindy Heitman — who was unceremniously dumped as superintdent by Weber et al. for no stated reason — has landed on her feet as president of the College of New Caledonia.
And Caden Fanshaw, the reporter reponsible for a lot of those scoops about the school board, is moving away from his role at CKPG as a reporter to a new one as host of their daily talk show, CKPG Today. Congrats to him and hoping someone steps in to fill his role as a driver of daily news in the city.
There have been a series of home invasions, some deadly, in the city over the past few weeks. The family of one of the victims, a 22-year-old mother of two, is speaking out and serving a reminder that even when police say they believe it was targeted and there isn’t a general threat to the public, there is real loss and tragedy here. And, sadly, if this is confirmed as a homicide it will mean 2023 is on track to being the deadliest year in the city, ever.
The proposed megapark in Prince George is now off the table, as the community groups behind it have decided to stop pushing for it to happen. The challenge was that while they were willing to pay up-front costs, it would have been taxpayers left holding the bag for years and years of maintenance into the future and there is real debate about whether projects should be allowed to jump to the front of the line just because well-financed proponents are willing to donate.
Tourism Prince George is considering moving the visitor centre from 1st Ave to either the Canada Games Plaza or Pine Centre Mall.
Development news: Home prices are back up to above $500,000 on average in the north. A new apartment building and multi-family home project is moving forward in the Hart. A new strip mall is coming to the area near the airport. People in College Heights are getting worried about the fact more than 1,4000 new homes could be coming to their neighbourhood (traffic would be nuts but hear me out: Better bus service). And I’m noticing more work happening at the housing project that’s being built along Foothills.
The Prince George Catholic diocese has been hit with a flurry of lawsuits, including four in the last few months.
The city is starting a campaign to stop the public from equating homeless with dangerous.
Meanwhile, the province is trying to figure out what to do about the homeless camp at Millennium Park and Baldy Hughes is under new management.
Cariboo Rocks the North is going to be quieter this year (in a good way).
OK, that’s it, I think? Twitter has collapsed, you can find me on Mastodon, Bluesky [invite code bsky-social-6lebm-tzgon) or Threads until it breaks, too. See you in September.
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Thanks for the great mid-summer round up! I always look forward to and enjoy your posts (notes? Whatever these are called on Substack) about local news and things of interest. :)
And maybe, just maybe, I'll tell you my FOI journey wone day. Still waiting to see how this actually finishes over 3-1/2 years since it started....