Opinion: Every so often I run into someone in a store or on the sidewalk and they are kind enough to tell me that they agreed with something I had written.
But that’s just every so often, it isn’t always that way.
I know for sure that perhaps not nearly everyone agrees all the time, but most of the time, when you don’t agree with what you read here, you just write it off to me having my opinion and you having yours, and that’s the end of it.
A few weeks before Christmas, however, the Golden Star got a subscription cancellation and the reason for the cancellation might have been totally my space. My opinions. Too political. And not local.
I thought I would comment a bit on that as an issue, and let you know why I write as I do, and what the prospects are for the future.
Let me start with a little history.
I have been in the newspaper business as a publisher or related to a publisher, (daughter Janet and now granddaughter Megan), for getting close to twenty-five years, over the last forty-two years. It started with a phone call from Rosemarie Nakumura, who with her husband, Toby, purchased the Golden Star in the late ’70s.
After running it for some years she called me one day and asked if I would like to buy it. I was almost taken aback and after talking about it for a while one of the questions I asked her was why she called me. There were probably lots of other people in Golden who might have been more capable of running a newspaper than me. She didn’t seem to have to think about it, she shot right back that since I had the biggest mouth in town, she thought I might be interested.
Rosemarie’s thoughts at the time were partly predicated on my being the Area ‘A’ Regional District Director (CSRD) then, and for the five years previous, and perhaps having done some things that hadn’t been done before. And I can’t really remember, but I had maybe written a few Letters to the Editor over that time as well.
In any event, Norma and I did buy the paper, and for the next few years, I wrote most, probably almost all, of the editorials. I continued in regional district and some of the things that I did there were of mixed opinion in the valley, such as the exclusions from the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) in which I initiated exclusions which removed approximately eight thousand acres from the ALR. ‘Mixed opinions’ is actually putting it lightly. There were very strong opinions on both sides of the issue.
Then after watching a house burn down in Nicholson one night, I did the political work to start the Nicholson Fire Department. Same story. Strong opinions in favour, equally strong against it. The referendum turned it down. But 18 months later I took it to referendum again and it passed.
Mosquito control was a similar kind of project. The first referendum failed, the second one passed. Rural house numbering was also an ’86 project.
Then, later that year, came the ski hill. That one was interesting because with it most of the people in the valley seemed to be in favour of starting a ski hill. Except town council. Since we had the newspaper I did an opinion survey in it and just under a thousand were returned to us. A whopping amount for an area this size! I separated the responses between town and Area ‘A’ residents and with that information, I knew more about even town residents opinions than the council did! So, along with the advice of many others, I took the ski hill issue to referendum and it passed overwhelmingly.
Later in 1986, I was elected MLA and along with that came another host of events which would take too much space to tell so I will spare you that!
But Donald Trump’s return to the presidency of the U.S. and my support of him in that role was guaranteed to raise some opinions in opposition. And it has. Not many, but at least a couple.
Here’s the real bottom line, however, and the reason I mentioned the things that I have done previously: the judgment that I use in putting my opinions together is the same judgment that I used in putting together opinions on those projects. I guess a case could be made saying that we would be better off without the Nicholson Fire Department or the ski hill or house numbers. But I’ll never be making those cases. And I won’t be apologizing to anyone for the positions I took on those or any other of my opinions. We are all entitled to our own opinions, even you and even me.
So for both my years in publishing and in politics, I’ve been in the opinion business. Both have opinions and putting them out there for people to agree or disagree with. So here, not long after the beginning of a new year, I thought I should use some space to tell you what I think the future for what it looks like.
It would be nice to have a column where everyone agreed with all the positions that it took. But if everyone agreed, it would be so watered down that there wouldn’t be any opinion left. So my space, as long as it’s mine, is likely to always have an opinion. If you agree with me even some of the time, I’ll be delighted.
And too political? You know, I can’t really help you there either. The business of running our local area, our province and our country is of huge importance. And since we are situated beside the US, and they are ten times our size, what happens there is a greater driver of our success than what happens in much of Canada. Even what happens in this small town, where most of our product goes to the US, and our major employer is American-owned, you can be sure that this space will always have strong opinions on their politics and their economy. As Tip O’Neil, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives from ’77 to ’87, often said, ‘All politics are local.’
If I were a gardener, I’d be happy to write a gardening column. But I’m 78 and haven’t had a garden yet. And will never have one. Nor a hunting or fishing column, since I don’t have the patience to either hunt or fish. And while we do occasionally venture into other issues, there will probably always be more politics here than any other single issue. I never really had an editorial mentor but if I did it would have been a fellow in Invermere named Des Askey, the father of one of the girls in my high school class. He wrote in the Lake Windermere Valley Echo every week in a column that he or someone at the paper named ‘As I See It,’ and if I were looking for a name for this column I think I’d steal his.
So, because of my interests and experience, I don’t foresee a great change in this space to accommodate the opinions of everyone. And, in fact, I think it’s more fun that way, for both you and for me.
If you want to respond, to this or any other column I’ve written, send a letter to the editor to janet.crandall@thegoldenstar.net
