Dunno, but the poor old world was pretty black and blue in 2015.
A devastating earthquake in Nepal. Terrorist attacks from Kenya to California. A German pilot who deliberately crashed an airliner into the Alps. So many mass shootings in the U.S. that we lost count, but what did Americans freak out about? Gay marriage.
We learned to expect the unexpected. Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn. Racist rhetoric Trumped rational reason. Jose Bautista flipped his bat and Tom Brady deflated his balls. Playboy dropped a bombshell: It’s dropping bombshells, with Vancouver Island’s own Pamela Anderson the last nude centrefold.
With that in mind, it’s time to turn the (unstapled) page. Here, in no particular order, are some of the stories — some significant, some definitely not — that Times Colonist readers will remember from 2015.
1. RED TIDE
Who would have thought at the outset of the election campaign (which, at 78 days, was just marginally shorter than the Victoria Day parade) that He’s Justin Not Ready Trudeau would win a Liberal majority?
Maybe Stephen Harper should have dropped the grim-lipped terrorist-under-the-bed routine, pulled off his niqab and posed for a few selfies instead.
Here on Vancouver Island, where we not only march to a different drummer but listen to a horn section no one else can hear, we charted our own course. Six of our seven ridings went to the NDP, meaning an island with one-47th of Canada’s population delivered one-seventh of that party’s seats. The Island also provided the Greens with one-fifth of their national vote — and their lone seat, won by Elizabeth “Anyone For Solitaire?” May.
Old Facebook posts, including one discussing the “truth” about 9/11, deleted the campaigns of two south Island Liberal candidates. That made them among a score of wannabe politicians (remember the Conservative who got caught peeing in a client’s coffee cup?) taken down by social media.
Up-Island Conservative John Duncan was defeated, leaving Harper as the last of the old Reform Party crowd still in the House of Commons.
2. FROM FRANCE TO FAIRFIELD
The year was bookended by gunfire in Paris — the Charlie Hebdo slaughter in January, then the multi-pronged attacks in November — that echoed all the way to Victoria, where in both cases we stood vigil in the cold and coloured our Facebook profile pics with the rouge, blanc et bleu of France.
Yet we forget that four days before Charlie Hebdo, Islamic extremists slaughtered 2,000 people in Nigeria. A day before November’s attack, bombs killed more than 40 in Beirut, Lebanon. Maybe it’s that we expect certain places to be more violent than others, but some terrorism hits closer to home.
That includes the bizarre story of Victoria-raised John Nuttall and his partner Amanda Korody, who in June were found guilty of conspiring to detonate pressure-cooker bombs outside the legislature during Canada Day festivities in 2013. Defence lawyers are now arguing that the verdict should be set aside because the RCMP’s tactics during a long undercover operation amounted to entrapment.
3. SYRIAN REFUGEES
Here’s a point of pride: At least 65 Vancouver Island groups have come together to sponsor refugees from the war in Syria. That’s open-armed compassion in action, the Canada we want to see when we look in the mirror.
Given the scale of the crisis — more than four million have fled Syria — Canada’s planned intake of 25,000 refugees by March might not seem like much.
But think back to those heartbreaking photos of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, dead on a Turkish beach in September, and reflect on the value of a single life.
Then think of what the future might hold for the family of five, including three children under age nine, who landed in Victoria in the week before Christmas.
4. TOFINO TRAGEDY
Ask people to name their favourite place on Vancouver Island — or Earth — and many will point to beautiful, peaceful, idyllic Tofino.
That made it seem all the worse when the 65-foot whalewatching boat Leviathan II capsized 15 kilometres west of the community Oct. 25, leaving six people — five Britons and an Australian — dead.
More among the 27 on board could have died were it not for those who rushed to their rescue, including many from the nearby village of Ahousaht.
The Transportation Safety Board doesn’t know when it will release a final report into its investigation.
It wasn’t the only marine tragedy to hit the west coast of the Island. Three of four crew members, all from Vancouver Island, died when the commercial fish boat Caledonian capsized and sank 55 kilometres west of Estevan Point, north of Tofino, in September.
5. SPECTOR 360
There was plenty of smirking last January when new Saanich Mayor Richard Atwell began his term with a series of seemingly outlandish claims that alienated fellow councillors, his police department and municipal staff.
The main charge: intrusive spyware had been secretly installed on his city hall computer.
But Atwell was able to claim vindication in March when privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s scathing report said the Spector 360 software really was over-the-top invasive (though an internal investigation later declared its installation to be the product of “a perfect storm,” with no individual to blame).
In June, the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner said four months of dispute resolution had failed to make peace between the police and the mayor, who had laid complaints over his department’s investigation of the spyware and the question of whether it was Saanich police who leaked details of a dispute Dec. 11 involving the mayor and the fiancé of a woman with whom Atwell admitted having an affair. Atwell had also implied he was being targeted by regional traffic police.
6. CLIMATE CHANGE/ THE DROUGHT
Hey, remember last summer’s drought? Good times, good times.
In our warmest summer in 75 years, Victoria saw almost no rain at all from April 24 until the end of August.
OK, it came at a cost: no river fishing, a campfire ban, no Sooke Canada Day fireworks, no Metchosin Day barbecue, the Cowichan in crisis, Island cattle producers in trouble, crops ripening at odd times. In Vancouver, the word of the year was #grassholes, used by social-media vigilantes to out water-restriction scofflaws. All the forests in B.C. burned down (well, no, but they did evacuate parts of Port Hardy, and Victoria did spend a spooky July day under an ultra-creepy, yellowy-orange Beijing sky).
Meanwhile, ocean acidification threatens shellfish growers and all of Vancouver Island’s glaciers are expected to disappear by 2050.
Nope, no evidence of climate change at all.
7. TRIPLE DELETE
Investigating a whistleblower’s complaint that a political staffer deliberately erased messages to avoid freedom-of-information laws, privacy commissioner Elizabeth Dunham found a culture in which provincial government emails are routinely “triple deleted” — the equivalent of killing them, burning the bodies, then chucking the ashes down a well.
Does it have the legs to be a damaging scandal, or are people so jaded about the lack of open government that they just shrug and go back to YouTubing kittens?
8. MORE POT SHOPS THAN STARBUCKS
A year and a half ago, the city of Victoria had four medical-marijuana dispensaries. Now there are a couple of dozen pot shops. And no, nobody pretends it’s all being sold for — cough, cough — medicinal purposes.
The pot law (or the lack thereof) has become a joke, applied in patchwork fashion. Shops operate with relative impunity in Victoria and Vancouver, which both opted for control by regulation. Esquimalt voted to keep dispensaries out altogether. In Nanaimo, where competition from the sudden proliferation of dispensaries led to layoffs at the federally licensed Tilray medical-marijuana factory — one of the biggest employers in town — the RCMP raided storefront operations.
Justin Trudeau has promised recreational marijuana, already legal from Oregon to Alaska, will soon be legal in Canada, too. That should at least bring some common rules, as well as a spike in Doritos sales.
9. THE HOMELESS, CHAPTER 476
How do you get 300 people to a public meeting in July? Suggest erecting a tent city in Topaz Park without first asking the neighbours, leaving them feeling like cannon fodder in the war on homelessness. Mayor Lisa Helps and Coun. Ben Isitt took it in the chops when they met residents in the park.
But if Helps et al took heat for some of their actions — such as paying homeless people $20 each to attend a public meeting — at least they were acting, trying to fill the leadership gap left by senior government. There was a lot of squirming and fussing when a tent city blossomed outside the Victoria courthouse this fall, but it’s not as though the campers came from nowhere; the courthouse site just made them more visible.
Meanwhile, while the rest of us were squabbling, a homeless man turned in $2,500 cash that he found in a Langford parking lot. When rewarded with $5,000 raised online, he gave the money to Our Place.
10. BACK TO THE FUTURE PART FIVE (OR, VICTORIA’S UNICORNS)
For a moment in 2014, it looked as if some of Victoria’s mythical creatures — amalgamation, sewage treatment, a new bridge — might become real.
But in 2015 we went back to our Alice In Wonderland selves, where the faster we ran, the farther away they got.
Amalgamation study: Despite an overwhelming message from voters in the 2014 local elections, most of the 90-odd mayors and councillors here in Dysfunction-By-The-Water continue to balk at looking into whether there should be 90-odd mayors and councillors here in Dysfunction-By-The-Water. Go figure, eh?
Johnson Street Bridge: The price climbed as steadily as the completion date marched back. When approved in a 2009 referendum, the bridge was to cost $63 million and be open by Sept. 30, 2015. Now the budget is nudging $98 million, with the contractor struggling to hit a 2017 deadline.
Sewage treatment: Nine years and more than $60 million spent so far, and not so much as an outhouse to show for it. Albert Sweetnam, the head of the failed Seaterra project, which would have seen a plant built at Esquimalt’s McLoughlin Point, was sent packing with a $500,000 severance package at the end of September. Meanwhile, the city of Seattle, fed up with all the delays, threatened to go Beastmode on us.
The CRD, faced with cost estimates of $1 billion to $1.4 billion, will look at treatment-site options (the main one in Victoria’s Rock Bay) this month. Many doubt the politicians have left themselves enough time to meet a March 31 deadline, putting at least $83.4 million of our federal funding at risk.
11. McKENZIE INTERCHANGE (OR, UNICORNS ARE REAL)
Call it Stephen Harper’s farewell gift to Victoria: Just before calling the election, the Conservatives announced $32.6 million toward an $85-million McKenzie Avenue interchange. The project, long thought to exist only in fantasy (just like Mordor, Hogwarts or a federal climate-change strategy) will take two years to build, beginning in late 2016. (So far, there’s no sign it will include McTavish-interchange-style crop circles.)
MP John Duncan, who sprinted around the Island like a German tourist handing out a good $150 million worth of pre-election federal spending, also announced the feds will contribute to a $22.6-million extension of Westshore Parkway.
The City of Victoria, meanwhile, plans to build a $7.75-million network of bike routes by November 2018. Thieves responded by stealing the mayor’s ride from City Hall.
12. ANIMAL CRACKERS
So, after months of hand- and hoof-wringing, Oak Bay’s controversial cull finally went ahead, reducing the urban deer population by precisely 11 animals. It was one of two culls conducted through a regional deer-management program that has cost $270,000 since 2013.
On the Saanich Peninsula, where thousands of geese are chewing their way through farmers’ crops, the CRD spent $31,200 on a pilot project that killed 43 birds. That’s $725 apiece. Your Christmas turkey only cost 18 bucks.
At this rate, the regional district will be predator-free by 2092 and bankrupt by April.
13. PUPPET CLUB(S)
When the Devil’s Army — police called them a puppet club of the Hells Angels — moved onto a Spencer Road property last spring, erecting a big black fence and a couple of signs featuring the number 41, complaints poured into Langford city hall. When residents rose up, council cracked down, going after the property owner for zoning and bylaw infractions.
Since then, the signs and fence have disappeared, and so have the bikers. No one appears to be living on the property.
The City of Victoria’s bylaw police also shut down a puppet club — though this one was of the Bert-and-Ernie variety, operating out of a home theatre in Fairfield. We’ll sleep more soundly now.
14. HOCKEYVILLE
Victoria sucks at winter. At the first sign of snow, we abandon four-wheel drives on the shoulder of the road and pump Prozac into the water supply. We own boogie boards, not toboggans.
But we’re still Canadian, damn it, as proven when North Saanich was voted Kraft Hockeyville and the Saanich Peninsula’s Jamie Benn, with brother and Dallas Stars teammate Jordie in support, won the NHL scoring title.
We also produced another fine example of Canadiana: the psycho hockey parent. Thanks to the bad behaviour of a few (like the mom who cheered on her son’s team by whipping off her bra and twirling it over her head) all Vancouver Island hockey parents must now take a course in respectful behaviour.
Makes you proud to be Canajun, eh?
15. LACROSSEVILLE
It might only be a regional passion but it’s still Canada’s other national game. And have no doubt: Victoria Shamrocks lacrosse fans — their roots in the game often going three, four generations deep or more — are as passionate as any in sports.
So it was a euphoric scene at Colwood’s Q Centre in September when the Rocks beat Peterborough for their ninth Mann Cup, their first national title since 2005. Bleed green.
16. MALAHAT LNG
B.C. has a long tradition of left-leaning non-natives who loudly champion the right of aboriginals to choose their own future — just as long it’s a future that meets the approval of left-leaning non-natives.
So lefties (and neighbouring bands) were left sputtering in August when the Malahat First Nation, having just bought the 525-acre Bamberton site, announced its support for an adjacent floating liquefied natural gas plant in Saanich Inlet.
But that came right after the resignation of Malahat chief Michael Harry, following allegations that he had accepted money from the company dumping contaminated soil near Shawnigan Lake. In his place was elected Caroline Harry, who said she wanted more information on Steelhead LNG’s proposal before committing to a position.
17. PARKING AMBASSADORS
Victoria’s parking police have long had a reputation for the kind of, um, efficiency that makes Swiss watchmakers swoon like a One Direction fangirl — and scares motorists away from downtown. So it arguably made sense from a PR perspective when the city decided to replace the Commissionaires with “parking ambassadors” (half the hires turned out to be Commissionaires) who took over on Jan. 1.
Not sure what the kinder, gentler approach means, though. Roses under the windshield wiper instead of tickets? Violation notices signed with a happy face? The thing is, the number of parking tickets was already in a steep decline, from 175,000 in 2013 to an estimated 130,000 in 2015.
Meanwhile, 20,000 people packed Douglas Street for Car Free Day — on the same June day that massive crowds packed car shows in Beacon Hill and Gyro parks.
18. GRIM DISCOVERY
In June, an exhaustive 11-day search of a 12-acre Prospect Lake property turned up the remains of Dana McKellar, a Victoria man reported missing in September 2014. The search, one of the largest ever done on Vancouver Island, involved 90 police officers, plus excavators, helicopters, ground-penetrating radar, electromagnetic mapping technologies and clandestine-grave-location experts. No arrests have been made in the case. Nor have police revealed what led them to the site.
19. HAROLD BACKER
Where is Harold Backer?
On Nov. 3, the Victoria investment adviser went for a bike ride … and disappeared.
Video footage showed a cyclist believed to be the three-time Olympic rower getting off the Coho ferry in Port Angeles, but that was the last trace of him.
It soon emerged that Backer, a family man, wrote a letter to several clients in which he expressed regret and took responsibility for decisions that cost them money — financial losses rumoured to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
20. OFF-TARGET
Remember how giddy consumers were when Target — the cool American kid with the hot deals — arrived in Canada in 2013?
Alas, Target’s Canadian adventure turned into the most disastrous U.S. invasion since the Bay of Pigs. Target Canada filed for bankruptcy in January and closed all 133 of its Canadian stores by April.
Its Hillside mall space will become a Canadian Tire in the spring, while the Lowe’s hardware giant is moving into the Tillicum mall spot.
21. OOPS
Like a stack of empty beer cans piled one layer too high, up to 100 crushed cars tumbled into the Selkirk Water when the barge on which they were being loaded tipped over Aug. 28.
The cars were all plucked from the chuck with no real damage done (they had been drained of fluid before loading). The barge, owned by Seaspan, is back in use. Scrap recycler Schnitzer Steel says adjustments have been made to the loading process.
22. LIONS AND TIGERS ...
In October, a wayward cougar discovered what all Victorians know: It’s really hard to get out of James Bay.
Thrilled/terrified residents watched the cat clear backyard fences before it was tranquillized on Michigan Street and relocated to the forest — where it was shot by the Minnesota dentist who killed Cecil the Lion (well, no, but the trophy hunting of cougars does continue on Vancouver Island).
23. ... AND BEARS
We also have other ways of alienating animal lovers: Ricky Gervais let his 10.2 million Twitter followers know about it after the B.C. government suspended conservation officer Bryce Casavant for refusing to shoot a pair of black bear cubs whose mother was killed in Port Hardy in July.
The B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union is grieving the suspension and Casavant’s subsequent transfer out of the conservation service.
The cubs are at Errington’s North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre, which plans to release them (and six similar-aged bears) into the wild this summer.
24. TWO GOT ON, THREE GOT OFF
Victoria’s Ada Guan got a nice Mother’s Day surprise while on an Air Canada flight to Tokyo. Somewhere over Russia, she gave birth.
Guan and dad Wesley Branch didn’t know she was pregnant (a test had come up negative). Baby Chloe now faces a lifetime of complicated explanations when asked to list her place of birth.
25. BUOYANT BOY
Speaking of travel surprises: In early November, a B.C. Ferries passenger launched an inflatable life-raft from the Coastal Celebration, then — with a gleeful “Yahoo!” — did a front flip into Active Pass. Ignoring the life-raft, he then swam to Galiano Island, where he was arrested after a woman found him wet and naked in her home. B.C. Ferries subsequently banned him for life.
Les Leyne could not be reached for comment.
