A friend recalled the great Jimmy Breslin’s concept of recounting people for whom he no longer had any time. It strikes me as a healthy, cleansing way to close out the year.
So here’s a “2013 List of People With Whom I Am No Longer on Speaking Terms.”
• Pollsters. What a clever, demographic-analyzing, age and gender-balancing bunch of phonies. They led us down the garden path about the state of B.C. politics. And at the end of the path was a compost pile. Which is where all their analysis belongs.
It’s not just that they collectively blew the 2013 election call. It’s also about how everyone (myself included) swallowed all their witchcraft without ever questioning aloud their pronouncements.
Next time I hear the phrase “19 times out of 20, plus or minus 3.5 per cent,” I’m going to pull the fire alarm and run screaming from the room.
(One of them determined this week that 52 per cent of B.C. thinks crowded malls at Christmas are bad. Thanks for that, Sigmund.)
• NDP dropouts. Leadership contests are weeks of fun for everyone. Speeches, road trips, fridge magnets. But you can’t have a horse race if the horses keep shying away from the starting gate.
It’s been three months since Leader Adrian Dix announced his job was up for grabs and all we’ve covered is press conferences where people say: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
They’re robbing us of all the drama and suspense we were counting on to fill 2013, or 2014, or whatever year they’re eventually going to hold the contest. And I can never forgive them for that.
• Apocalyptic evangelicals who interpret politics via the Old Testament. One in particular has stuffed my junk folder with graphic notes about “Satan’s UN Agenda,” “God’s vengeance on election-riggers” and how “evil lying bastards” like me will burn in hell for all eternity.
Dude, chill. Maybe it’s just the chem trails, but I don’t follow your logic trail. And by the way, stop hating women.
• The B.C. government’s “B-side” communication team. It’s a chatty blog designed to “personalize” government news. It makes my hair stand on end.
We’re paying communication staff top dollar to ask cabinet ministers: “What is your favorite sport?” “Are you a morning person or a night person?” “What is your favourite B.C. food?”
How has an outfit like that survived the “core review” that’s supposed to be cutting all non-essential functions?
I’d ask them, but as noted, we’re not on speaking terms.
• Anybody who wants to talk about the B.C. Rail case. The 10th anniversary of police raid on the legislature is next week. They were looking into the scandalous activities of two aides involved in the negotiations over the sale of the former Crown railway to CN.
The auditor general just pegged the total cost of that case at a stunning $18 million. There’s been a concerted push over that decade to draw the politicians into the scandal. It’s gone nowhere. Tens of thousands of documents have been pored over and there is still no smoking gun that links any politicians to the criminality.
The NDP promised in the election campaign to spend $10 million more on a public inquiry. But the Liberals won, as they did in 2009 and 2005. They’ve won three elections with the B.C. Rail scandal hanging over their heads. I’m starting to think B.C. Rail is over.
• Dayleen van Ryswyk. She was the NDP candidate in Kelowna-Mission who crashed on the first turn, when previously overlooked postings were brought to light by ever-helpful Liberals.
She had sharp words for aboriginal people and mused about how French Canadians are “universally hated” and she was “so sick of having french stuffed down my throat.”
She apparently overlooked the fact that the leader of her own party is openly francophile and sometimes flagrantly bursts into fluent French. In full public view, no less.
Dix canned her from the NDP, instantly. She bounced back to run in the premier’s byelection and got less than one per cent of the vote.
Hey Dayleen, guess what? We’re through. C’est fini.
