Resource espionage, cockroach tales, a teen classic and more ER blues

Plus, the case for Christy Clark

Hello awesome readers,

With the provincial election writ drop less than a month away, we’re enjoying a little calm before the storm, but still found a medley of news items you might want to know about, including – don’t look away – another bedbug story!

Enjoy!

Okanagan farmers slammed again

A crucial development in the Okanagan last week was the closure of the 88-year-old BC Tree Fruits cooperative, which purportedly served 430 farming families working 7,000 acres. Peach, plum, apricot, cherry, and grape growers relied on the co-op for farm-to-table services, including packing, storage and distribution of produce. Somehow, despite having a provincial rep on their board, the co-op still went under citing low fruit volume and an uneconomical future. Farmers are reportedly devastated.

“I had a meeting with 21 growers where grown men were crying, literally, seeing generations of farms potentially being wiped out,” BC United leader Kevin Falcon told Rob Shaw for Northern Beat. Falcon said it never should have come to a crisis. The BCU have called for a freeze on the co-op’s asset liquidation, emergency aid to get growers through the current season and an audit to find out how it all went so wrong.

BC Conservatives leader John Rustad called the closure a setback to food security and condemned the BC govt for allowing a “vital institution to collapse.” His party committed to investments in agriculture to modernize farming technology and techniques, among other measures.

Agriculture Minister Pam Alexis meanwhile, issued an uninspired statement with a list of previous programs her ministry had funded: “Our government has provided almost $200 million to the tree fruit sector alone through various programs over the past four years.” The latter claim had growers scratching their heads over the whereabouts of the reputed $200 million in largesse, writes Vaughn Palmer.

In a separate conversation, a long-time employee of BC Tree Fruits told me the co-op had problems beyond govt neglect. “It was so poorly managed,” the now-laid-off worker said.  To be successful, it needs to be run like a business, he said. “Our board gave the wrong people too much power and they made so many bad decisions,” including overspending on upgrades and not paying growers enough.

Mother Nature didn’t help this year either. There were few cherries and none or limited preaches and apricots. Many growers had been choosing not to ship their produce to the co-operative because of disagreements with the way the co-op was being run, my source said. To be successful, the co-op needs a cash infusion to cover this season and previous debt, and all new leadership, he said.

Mandated care: To be or not to be

The topic of mandated care is making the rounds again. If it gains traction as an election issue, it will be to the advantage of the BC United and the BC Cons. Both have come out clearly in favour of mandatory healthcare for the small number of people with the most severe addictions and mental health challenges, including those with permanent brain damage through drug use.

BCU was first out the gate and has the most detailed addictions recovery-oriented plan of any provincial party. BC Cons leader John Rustad has been equally supportive of mandated care and his party shares similar policy goals, even if his party platform is lighter on specifics for how that would be accomplished. The BC NDP have tried not to touch the mandatory care topic with a 50K-foot pole, although both former premier John Horgan and current Premier David Eby have talked about it without changing the status quo.

John Horgan tried to introduce a temporary mandated care for youth following overdose and got shot down by the BC Greens – along with the chief coroner, the child and youth advocate, civil liberties, the BC Indian Chiefs, and others – during their power-sharing governance days. Horgan eventually gave in to advocates and abandoned what appeared to be a sincere quest to help youths and their families, shortly before stepping down as premier.

David Eby has twice spoken to Northern Beat about mandated treatment, first as AG, then as premier, but for various reasons, mostly political, he’s failed to manifest it as public policy. Rob Shaw explains why the BC NDP might firm up their position on it in their election platform.

If you’re interested in learning a bit more on the issues, we did a deep dive on the pros, cons, ethics and politics of it – Quandary of mandatory care. It’s a long, but still relevant read, with a cross section of perspectives from former AG Geoff Plant, Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog, former BC RCMP assistant commissioner Eric Stubbs, and Premier Eby, to the inimitable Derrick Forsyth.

Also weighing in was Amanda Butler, co-author of the repeat offending report commissioned by Eby when he was AG. The report recommended several measures related to mandatory care, strengthening the treatment-or-jail option for people with addictions, creating secured addictions care for people not in custody and building therapeutic addictions units in jail.

Are First Nations getting played?

Scouring through yet more top secret national security documents in the CSIS and NSICOP catacombs, investigative journalist Sam Cooper discovers Chinese operatives have been surreptitiously trying to gain access to Canadian natural resources through Indigenous leaders.

Beijing intelligence operations are targeting First Nations leaders on the false pretense of tourism when they are actually aiming to secure Aboriginal-controlled natural resources, according to a confidential NSICOP (National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians) report obtained by Cooper at The Bureau.

“Many of the same tactics used to target elected officials at the federal level are replicated with provincial, municipal, and indigenous officials,” states a June 2019 report by NSICOP.

For instance, in 2011, China invited Indigenous leaders to visit ostensibly to discuss tourism opportunities. In fact, “the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] conducted research on each [Indigenous] delegate in part to identify their ‘potential usefulness’ to the PRC,” and the Chinese Minister Counsellor concluded the “Chiefs are ‘blind’ when dealing with the PRC and have no interest in knowing more.”

How many of BC’s First Nations have been targeted? Are they aware of the threat? If not, shouldn’t CSIS inform them?

As recently as October 2023, a story by CBC News reported CISIS was concerned with security threats in the North and Arctic, including foreign interference and espionage “primarily from China and then Russia. Both desire access to natural resources in the Arctic [and the Canadian north], like minerals.”

It’s yet another case for the Eby govt to press pause on the breakneck speed with which it is signing land agreements and granting generous title claims that give First Nations statutory decision making (and veto) on resource development in their claimed territory.

The case for Clark

National Post had an interesting breakdown of 10 possible contenders who might succeed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he steps down before the next election. Spoiler: Christy Clark rounds out the list (you’ll have to read the story for the other nine).

While Clark would get a mixed reception in some BC quarters as any former head of state is wont to illicit, she could hold significant appeal for voters across Canada. Since she lacks the political baggage of being part of the Trudeau administration, she might be able to convince enough of the public that she could significantly refresh the Liberal Party and steer it back to the political centre where small-l liberals keep a lonely vigil.

Christy Clark can even pull off cowgirl boots. [Calgary Stampede, Christy Clark X]

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Clark is an experienced, tough politician. She can hold her own in the boardroom as well as on the industrial job site. At the least, her candidacy would spice up the election landscape. It would also stutter the strategy stride of the federal Conservative Party and challenge leader Pierre Poilievre’s communication strategy.

Poilievre can tend toward an aggressive, bullying approach, particularly when confronted by what he considers impertinent reporters or obfuscating government cabinet ministers. He’d need to temper his speaking style with Clark though. A man berating a woman isn’t a great look for any candidate.

And without Trudeau as an easy fall guy target – which resonates soundly with Poilievre supporters – his team will have to dig deeper for ways to diminish Clark’s appeal. Can’t call her a corrupt wacko for instance and ‘F*k Clark’ banners won’t resonate quite the same on the side of an F150 truck.

On the plus side for voters, their debates would likely be lively, possibly entertaining, potentially quite informative. Poilievre is intelligent and unusually quick on his feet. So is Clark. She’d have the tricky task of having to distance herself from bad Liberal decisions without dissing them. He’d probably run circles around her on federal public policies given his decades of immersion in Ottawa. But her understanding of provincial policy and work experience beyond the federal arena could bring some advantage.

She can also be quite charming and has a brilliant smile, two qualities not to be underestimated. Both of which might inspire Poilievre to up his game in that department. If he can pull off contacts and a lumberjack shirt, he can find a way to warm up his persona for Canadians. Maybe crack a few more jokes and add some self-deprecating asides. For pointers, his team might look to vintage John Horgan press conferences, as he was master of both.

Before getting too carried away of course, Clark has to actually want, and choose, to run. Given the current unpopularity of the federal Liberals, the assured brutality of a campaign against Poilievre and the Conservatives, it’s hard to imagine she’d have enough checks in the pro column to give it a go. But it’s fun to imagine the contest if she did.

‘We must, we must, improve our bust’

I was about 13 when I, along with millions before and after me, devoured the pubescent girl-lit classic Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Judy Blume’s intimate narrative style and relatable characters entranced my teen heart and brain. For those of us who never got the ‘birds and bees’ talk, the novel counselled, consoled, entertained and informed. But I hadn’t given it much thought until reading Kat Rosenfield’s piece in The Free Press this weekend

She looks exactly like my best friend from elementary. [Image Are You There, God? It’s Me Margaret cover, Dell Publishing]

According to Rosenfield, the novel “demystifies the bodily changes associated with the onset of puberty, and approaches the idea of becoming a woman with a sense of wonder.” It’s that state of wonder that Rosenfield worries is missing in today’s generation of overly-anxious girls and young women.

Rather than being an “exciting sign of maturity,” puberty has become a battleground of gender ideology, #MeToo, the fall of Roe v. Wade and the characterization of natural male characteristics as predation or toxic masculinity, culminating in the message “that to be a woman is to exist in a nightmarish state of perpetual physical vulnerability.”

No wonder girls are anxious and depressed.

“The result is an entire generation of girls who are not just terrified of becoming women, but actively distressed by narratives that depict the process in a realistic way.” 

In Judy Blume’s Are you there, God? and other novels, becoming a woman is exciting, relationships are tricky, but rewarding, and while boys are very different, love can be dyno-mite.

Our girls could use a lot less worry and more time with that writing gem, Judy Blume.

Speaking of birds and bees

XY Athletes are not the same as XX athletes. For anyone curious about the differences, and following the Olympics boxing controversy of two women who previously tested positive for male chromosomes, read Doriane Lambelet Coleman’s detailed, non-emotional, scientific explainer in the Quillette here. Coleman does a great job of laying out XX vs XY characteristics, testosterone levels and why it matters in sports competition.

Both Imane Khelif, a 25-year-old welterweight from Algeria, and Lin Yu-ting, a 28-year-old featherweight from Taiwan, won medals in the women’s category at the previous Olympics in Tokyo. But they were both disqualified from fighting in the International Boxing Assoc-run Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi last year after two tests – in 2022 and 2023 – showed testosterone levels consistent with biological males. Neither athlete contested the test results.

Fyi, unlike some transgender female athletes – born biological male but who later identify as female – neither Khelif, nor Yu-ting have identified as trans. Both were raised as females, but have biological male characteristics that science says give them an advantage in boxing.

Interestingly, two other female Olympians from the 1920s and 1930s with strong male characteristics are now being held up as early trans athlete trailblazers to justify trans women competing in women’s sport when actually, they weren’t trans in the modern sense, in that they didn’t identify as women, they were raised female.

Zdeněk Koubek was a German sprinter and Mary Weston was Britain’s shotput, javelin and discus national champion. Both are believed to have been born with what’s known as a disorder of sex development, which is essentially atypical genital development (some speculate Khelif and Yu-ting may have a similar ‘disorder’).

Weston was raised and believed herself to be a female until learning about anatomy in her early 20s while studying to be a massage therapist.  

“I always imagined I was a girl until 1928,” Weston told the Reading Eagle in 1936. “Then competing at the world championships at Prague, Czchoslovakia, I began to realize that I was not normal and had no right to compete as a woman.”

Weston withdrew from female competition “feeling it was unfair to women competitors who were undoubtedly 100 per cent feminine,” he told the Athens, Georgia Banner Herald in 1936. Weston consulted a specialist and after two operations, emerged from hospital as Mark Weston.

Koubek also underwent surgery and went on to live as a man. Weston married his long-time, best friend Alberta, and they had three children. Neither chose to compete in men’s sports.

The media was more matter-of-fact back then as the Daily Mirror said Weston won the shot put title unaware he was “competing unfairly against other women competitors” – it was an honest mistake, not a case of fraud, according Cambridge researcher Vanessa Heggie, who wrote an illuminating paper on the history of gender testing in international sport.

False veneer of equivalence

A few wise words from staff writer Tom Nichols in The Atlantic’s Aug. 1 newsletter on the prisoner exchange that saw Wall Street Journal journalist  Evan Gershkovich, among others, freed from Russian prison:

“When the media call such deals “prisoner exchanges,” they are being accurate, but the term creates a veneer of equivalence: We have prisoners; they have prisoners; everyone makes deals. The fact that the West is holding Russian murderers and spies and Russia is holding Western journalists and basketball players is lost in the cold details of trading living human beings as if they were heads of cattle or loads of lumber.”

We should celebrate the release of the Americans, Europeans and Russian political prisoners, Nichols says, “but make no mistake: The Kremlin is getting what it wants. And any Westerners who set foot in Russia should always understand that they could be the next bargaining chips for some future deal.”

Lights out by the numbers

In July alone, Northeast BC communities were hit by 21 Emergency Room hospital diversions and one 67-hour birthing centre closure.

In all, various emergency rooms were closed for a total of 250 hours, according to a neat piece of reporting by Energeticcity.ca reporter Caitlin Coombes, who lays out hours of interrupted healthcare service in the NE, community-by-community. Chetwynd logged the most time without its emergency room last month at a total of 143 hours without service.

When asked about the closures last week, Health Minister Adrian Dix cited his government’s efforts in staffing recruitment, hospital construction, and investments in the rural ambulance service. All of which is true. Under his watch, ambulance drivers now get paid full-time instead of being on call which has dramatically increased the number of paramedics in the province. Hospital construction is slowly moving forward and staff recruitment campaigns are ongoing.

Left unsaid was how the system is bleeding nurses to agencies and stress leave, in part because of wild-west work conditions in hospitals that a weak union and an ideologically-captured government and health authorities refuse to admit, let alone fix.

Health is the biggest, most complicated ministry and Dix did an amazing job managing resources through the early part of the pandemic. But that was then; this is now. These days, our hospital system is spiraling into dysfunction. So, it's a good thing govt expanded the ambulance service, rural residents will need it more than ever given the unprecedented number of ER closures they are facing.

Cockroach hotels

Due to overwhelming reader interest in BC Housing’s ongoing infestation at Victoria Towers, our last word goes to Ted Clarke on the entomology beat in Prince George.

In this week’s update, Clarke interviewed a local exterminator about bedbugs, cockroaches and the brisk business he does terminating their existence.

The Prince George Citizen reporter has a knack for detail, while weaving in useful, if disturbing, educational context, including that a typical bedbug is about the size of an apple seed (good to know), how “bedbugs are nocturnal parasites who feed off the blood of humans, biting people while they are asleep in bed … unlike cockroaches, which climb and descend to different floors along plumbing and ventilation lines…” (eeewww)

When’s the horror novel coming out, Ted? We’ll be all over the pre-sales.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading!

Hope you catch some sun and relaxation in August.

Fran

Question, comments, story ideas, contact Fran@NorthernBeat.ca

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