Excellent work Craig! I'm so glad you're exposing the foreign network inserting themselves into what is and should be, a local issue, decided by local people. By attacking elected city councillors, the small, vocal minority of anti-name-change people are simply demonstrating their anti-democratic bonafides, and as that photo in council chambers demonstrates, serious deficits in there (SIC) intelligence. It's confirmation bias on fucking steroids. As for Aaron Gunn: we need to ensure that the 60%+ that voted against him do not split the vote next time.
I get the picture. The right and the far right are organized, very organized and well funded. They say you have to fight fire with fire, so it means we have to get organized. The article outlines the historical evolution of Atlas and it's power and how it's voice is the voice of a very powerful class. Someone realized that they who control the narrative will control the outcome. There are many narratives that have made Canada a liveable place (co-op housing, medicare for all among others) and have been ignored or countered by the likes of Atlas and the public and if they are not supported and fought for they will disappear and we all will wonder what hit us. Time to get control of the narrative.
very interesting thanks! The beautiful thing about this kind of story (and I agree it is too common) is that it shows us how much power we have. Use this story to tell people who've given up or who think the system is rigged... Use it to tell them: we are powerful; the leaching class are scared of us and how we come together to understand and change the world. If society was really rigged for the rich (in a way that we can't change') then why would they bother with this kind of thing? So, let's organize and keep changing the rules (and the names) to benefit everyone.
Interesting on many fronts - one being I'd thought it was the Koch Bros who hatched the Fraser Institute rather than this Fisher guy, but evil overlords are good at keeping their names out of the news. And I didn't know about Gunn's being given a leg-up by the so-called Canadian Taxpayers' Foundation, who don't represent 0rcinary taxpayers and are funded by a tax deduction claim or whatever exact tax-avoidance scheme it is; having Global call on the CTF regularly as if they were experts rather than propaganda is one of the other galling things about BC's media landscape, among go much else. Hypocritas belongs in the provincial motto along with Quid Pro Quo - our Splendor was Diminished a long time ago.
Your essay highlights a lot of what I wanted to get at three or four weeks ago as a supplementary to USian George Conway as as supplement to this reply to his opus on Alberta separatism after his chat with Mr. Black Cowboy Hat ex-Marine-forever-Marine Jeff Rath: https://skookum70.substack.com/p/reply-to-george-conways-video-on
My contention is that the Alberta Gambit is only flanking manoeuvre to encircle the main prize - us, that is - and the first over move of a pawn on the continent's geopolitical chessboard; it's a flanking manoeuvre which is successful would isolate BC and force it into the maw of the jaws of Manifest Destiny's rough beast slouching towards Fairbanks to be born; as boasted about in US papers after the Alaska Purchase., thirsting for BC blatantly and echoed by Teddy Roosevelt's threat to invade and annex us if the US didn't get its way on the Alaska Boundary; I hadn't heard that until I read it on the mural in the Pacific Northwest gallery of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC back in 1976 on an Easter weekend break from McGill, where I was a student at the time.
Contrary to UBC's self-appointed doyenne of BC history (Jean Barman) that the Alaska and Oregon Boundary disputes that the Oregon and Alaska (and San Juan) disputes aren't worth studying as they were 'foregone conclusions", that claim is wildly wrong as a read through my other substacks on Manifest Destiny and the how much of BC was lost to Alaska ; this being one one of them https://skookum70.substack.com/p/how-british-columbia-got-screwed ... turns out it was Eddy the Seventh who gave Lord Alverstone the order to take the American side, not that Alverstone wasn't only a simple Yankee-lover.
But back to your essay about American power behind the scenes in BC lately, this has been ongoing for a while as the American fifth column here dates from long before the Campbell government's giveaways of Crown agencies, services, and crown corps and has always involved BC's wealthy establishment - not just Chip Wilson; but guys like David McLean of CN and the Vancouver Film Studios and the stockbroker elites of the North Shore and the West Side and so on.
I'm tempted to mention - so will - tell about Lara Dauphinee, the mysterious woman with no real background who was Gordo's private secretary and aide with TWO top-level civil service salaries, one of them being for running the Public Affairs Bureau. "the largest newsroom in the province" with over 330 "reporters" , from whose office in the basement of the Leg on on boxing Day 2003 the Victoria City Police at the urging of the DEA, as the Campbell-allied RCMP had refused to prosecute the warrant. Always kept plain-looking in public in BC with a scarf and glasses, when the whole fracas was over and Campbell in Canada House in London, she came out as a stunning beauty in high fashion as a Vancouver socialite with half-a-dozen boardships..... our very own mata hari with the whiff of a CIA 'control' all mixed with her perfume and jewels.
Their behaviour of BC''s establishment during the Solidarity Crisis of '83 said it all, having cocktail parties on their sailboats in case the impending revolution turned ugly, and celebrating what was about to happen, with Bennett threatening use of troops if the general strike had gone forward, and the just-back-in-print Vancouver Sun's front cover featuring a huge photo of all 27 members of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) smiling for the camera next to a few column inches about two divisions of US Marines on manoeuvres in Sedro Woolley, less than two hours from Blaine and Sumas, next to a small blurb about Bill bennett's statement on the Webster Show about using troops if push came to shove.
Note: Bennett would have had to have Pierre Trudeau's blessing to bring in US troops as the port and the railways would have been on strike on the Thursday of the strike and it would be a continental security emergency...... you won't find a peep about any of this in Ms Barman's magnum opus, by the way, o the Expo Lands Scandal or the BCRIC scam or the Forests Act of 1976 ..... our academic historians are asleep at the switch, and IMO furnded to stay that way..
Now we have a concerted pop[agada campaign in many flavours of discorred and Untruth, an Orwellian media culture where Newspeak and False News are the norm, and a society kept half-educated about indigenous culture and "urban elites" where tragedies like Tumbler Ridge are quickly blamed on the "libtards' and the federal Liberals and provincial NDP and our courts and supposed lack of "traditional values" and - so twisted - our lack of gun ownership is somehow what caused an estranged and likely bullied individual in an isolated mountain town to go nuts and kill so many children in fit of madness. MAGAism is everywhere, being fanned and inflamed by PostMedia, Black Press and Glacier Media with each new issue.
I've been monitoring and at times rejoindered on the British Columbia Prosperity Project FaceBook page since it first raised its well-funded head on FB about a month ago; it's a strange mx of fake legal arguments and non-sequiturs about BC's origins and the Royal Proc vs other irrelevant treaties, even the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 and weird use of arcane terms like "extracession' and 'allodial" and a pretense of court speech mixed with outright hatred and fear-mongering.
In the meantime has anyone noticed that our TV stations and papers are saying nothing at all about ICE activities next door in Whatcom County and when Portland OR - closer than Salmon Arm or Penticton - was being attacked by Trump and Kristi Noem's private army off masked goons?
Compartmentalism of our media even within Canada has been a big problem since the 1970s and before, and "we don't hear about colonization of our media because our media has been colonized", same with our academia and politics (that quote is from the opening episode of the CBC national televized coffeeklatch "People Talking Back in 1976 - observed by one of the woman in the host group of the Edmonton group at the U. of A......long before the oil companies took over the Alberta media and political culture.
So what to do? I don't know - other than connecting with others with opened eyes and clear minds... I note that lately the b.s. right has been making inroads in Substack.....
Now that few weeks of HTML code-wrangling is hopefully over and resolved, next up on my writing agenda is to get to draft letters to the Guardian' s Canadian correspondent (in Toronto, of course) and whatever US political zines such as the Daily Beast, Mother jones, the Village Voice, and the NYT to get them to go after Chatham Assets Management and the Trumpite Alabamian who own Black Press for heir manipulation of Canadian and BC politics as unwantend and LYING rags worth the stock market going after and crashing their stock.
Fight fire with fire, and money is what has driven the takeover of BC and all of Canada - so what do we do? Why, a "Bonfire of the Vanities" of course - we just have to make sure the right oligarchs are on the bonfire when it burns.
this paper of yours BC History Boy, wll be part of my submission. Alsos to the Salish Sea Current, an independent writers' collective zine based in Bellingham; something we might work out how to start an equivalent for here in BC.....
Thank-you for this, it's very interesting and has confirmed a suspicion I have had for some time that some organization and money was working behind the scenes. My only question is, were all of the people at the blow-up city hall meeting senior citizens? As a senior myself, I do not want to be lumped in with them. By categorizing seniors in one group their many differences and life phases are not acknowleged. In any event, with luck, you too will be a senior citizen one day.
Fair point Cynthia! I do think the overwhelming majority of the concerned citizens are senior citizens, which is why I refer to them that was. I certainly don't think, nor intend to give the impression, that all seniors are at fault.
I have much respect for the elders in our community and sorry if that doesn't come across in my writing. Thanks for the feedback 🙏
Great article Craig. I just have to take issue with your description of Ted Vizzutti being elderly. He’s younger than our grad class of 81 so in effect you are calling a lot of people old, and we still feel young. There’s a lot of other words that could be more fitting.
A huge wow! I’ve just found you Craig and subscribed. A lifelong Vancouverite here. And love history. I was up in Powell River last year for an “event” which sure had my eyes opened wide…….have you submitted this to any publication? As a history/opinion piece? Maybe you do this already.
Here's the latest bit of insane madness at the BC Prosperity Project, and my response:
Curtis's Post
The BC Prosperity Project ·
Curtis Stone
·
Instead of playing wack-a-mole with Canadian policies you want to stop, BC independence is an all-in-one way to stop all of it.
Mass migration, woke indoctrination and funding, anti-development, DRIPA and UNDRIP, geo-engineering, income tax, speculative real estate, inflation, climate change policies, funding foreign wars, ect.
Declaring independence is the solution for all of it!
__________________
Michael Cleven
Forced emigration, bonehead indoctrination and stupidity-funding, pro-big-development,, no respect for international standards about indigenous peoples (10% of BC's population and a majority in less-urbanized regions), geo-engineering of the very wrong kind, no taxes to support roads and schools and hospitals, out-of-control inflation as capital avoids a radicalized rabid-right regime, climate change acceleration, and funding foreign wars on US by our rapacious neighbour.
You guys are drinking from the upside-down bottle.
Excellent work Craig! I'm so glad you're exposing the foreign network inserting themselves into what is and should be, a local issue, decided by local people. By attacking elected city councillors, the small, vocal minority of anti-name-change people are simply demonstrating their anti-democratic bonafides, and as that photo in council chambers demonstrates, serious deficits in there (SIC) intelligence. It's confirmation bias on fucking steroids. As for Aaron Gunn: we need to ensure that the 60%+ that voted against him do not split the vote next time.
I get the picture. The right and the far right are organized, very organized and well funded. They say you have to fight fire with fire, so it means we have to get organized. The article outlines the historical evolution of Atlas and it's power and how it's voice is the voice of a very powerful class. Someone realized that they who control the narrative will control the outcome. There are many narratives that have made Canada a liveable place (co-op housing, medicare for all among others) and have been ignored or countered by the likes of Atlas and the public and if they are not supported and fought for they will disappear and we all will wonder what hit us. Time to get control of the narrative.
very interesting thanks! The beautiful thing about this kind of story (and I agree it is too common) is that it shows us how much power we have. Use this story to tell people who've given up or who think the system is rigged... Use it to tell them: we are powerful; the leaching class are scared of us and how we come together to understand and change the world. If society was really rigged for the rich (in a way that we can't change') then why would they bother with this kind of thing? So, let's organize and keep changing the rules (and the names) to benefit everyone.
also, the successes of the right wing should also be evidence for us of what works -- story, organizing, funding. We can do these things too.
Interesting on many fronts - one being I'd thought it was the Koch Bros who hatched the Fraser Institute rather than this Fisher guy, but evil overlords are good at keeping their names out of the news. And I didn't know about Gunn's being given a leg-up by the so-called Canadian Taxpayers' Foundation, who don't represent 0rcinary taxpayers and are funded by a tax deduction claim or whatever exact tax-avoidance scheme it is; having Global call on the CTF regularly as if they were experts rather than propaganda is one of the other galling things about BC's media landscape, among go much else. Hypocritas belongs in the provincial motto along with Quid Pro Quo - our Splendor was Diminished a long time ago.
Your essay highlights a lot of what I wanted to get at three or four weeks ago as a supplementary to USian George Conway as as supplement to this reply to his opus on Alberta separatism after his chat with Mr. Black Cowboy Hat ex-Marine-forever-Marine Jeff Rath: https://skookum70.substack.com/p/reply-to-george-conways-video-on
My contention is that the Alberta Gambit is only flanking manoeuvre to encircle the main prize - us, that is - and the first over move of a pawn on the continent's geopolitical chessboard; it's a flanking manoeuvre which is successful would isolate BC and force it into the maw of the jaws of Manifest Destiny's rough beast slouching towards Fairbanks to be born; as boasted about in US papers after the Alaska Purchase., thirsting for BC blatantly and echoed by Teddy Roosevelt's threat to invade and annex us if the US didn't get its way on the Alaska Boundary; I hadn't heard that until I read it on the mural in the Pacific Northwest gallery of the American Museum of Natural History in NYC back in 1976 on an Easter weekend break from McGill, where I was a student at the time.
Contrary to UBC's self-appointed doyenne of BC history (Jean Barman) that the Alaska and Oregon Boundary disputes that the Oregon and Alaska (and San Juan) disputes aren't worth studying as they were 'foregone conclusions", that claim is wildly wrong as a read through my other substacks on Manifest Destiny and the how much of BC was lost to Alaska ; this being one one of them https://skookum70.substack.com/p/how-british-columbia-got-screwed ... turns out it was Eddy the Seventh who gave Lord Alverstone the order to take the American side, not that Alverstone wasn't only a simple Yankee-lover.
But back to your essay about American power behind the scenes in BC lately, this has been ongoing for a while as the American fifth column here dates from long before the Campbell government's giveaways of Crown agencies, services, and crown corps and has always involved BC's wealthy establishment - not just Chip Wilson; but guys like David McLean of CN and the Vancouver Film Studios and the stockbroker elites of the North Shore and the West Side and so on.
I'm tempted to mention - so will - tell about Lara Dauphinee, the mysterious woman with no real background who was Gordo's private secretary and aide with TWO top-level civil service salaries, one of them being for running the Public Affairs Bureau. "the largest newsroom in the province" with over 330 "reporters" , from whose office in the basement of the Leg on on boxing Day 2003 the Victoria City Police at the urging of the DEA, as the Campbell-allied RCMP had refused to prosecute the warrant. Always kept plain-looking in public in BC with a scarf and glasses, when the whole fracas was over and Campbell in Canada House in London, she came out as a stunning beauty in high fashion as a Vancouver socialite with half-a-dozen boardships..... our very own mata hari with the whiff of a CIA 'control' all mixed with her perfume and jewels.
Their behaviour of BC''s establishment during the Solidarity Crisis of '83 said it all, having cocktail parties on their sailboats in case the impending revolution turned ugly, and celebrating what was about to happen, with Bennett threatening use of troops if the general strike had gone forward, and the just-back-in-print Vancouver Sun's front cover featuring a huge photo of all 27 members of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) smiling for the camera next to a few column inches about two divisions of US Marines on manoeuvres in Sedro Woolley, less than two hours from Blaine and Sumas, next to a small blurb about Bill bennett's statement on the Webster Show about using troops if push came to shove.
Note: Bennett would have had to have Pierre Trudeau's blessing to bring in US troops as the port and the railways would have been on strike on the Thursday of the strike and it would be a continental security emergency...... you won't find a peep about any of this in Ms Barman's magnum opus, by the way, o the Expo Lands Scandal or the BCRIC scam or the Forests Act of 1976 ..... our academic historians are asleep at the switch, and IMO furnded to stay that way..
Now we have a concerted pop[agada campaign in many flavours of discorred and Untruth, an Orwellian media culture where Newspeak and False News are the norm, and a society kept half-educated about indigenous culture and "urban elites" where tragedies like Tumbler Ridge are quickly blamed on the "libtards' and the federal Liberals and provincial NDP and our courts and supposed lack of "traditional values" and - so twisted - our lack of gun ownership is somehow what caused an estranged and likely bullied individual in an isolated mountain town to go nuts and kill so many children in fit of madness. MAGAism is everywhere, being fanned and inflamed by PostMedia, Black Press and Glacier Media with each new issue.
I've been monitoring and at times rejoindered on the British Columbia Prosperity Project FaceBook page since it first raised its well-funded head on FB about a month ago; it's a strange mx of fake legal arguments and non-sequiturs about BC's origins and the Royal Proc vs other irrelevant treaties, even the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 and weird use of arcane terms like "extracession' and 'allodial" and a pretense of court speech mixed with outright hatred and fear-mongering.
In the meantime has anyone noticed that our TV stations and papers are saying nothing at all about ICE activities next door in Whatcom County and when Portland OR - closer than Salmon Arm or Penticton - was being attacked by Trump and Kristi Noem's private army off masked goons?
Compartmentalism of our media even within Canada has been a big problem since the 1970s and before, and "we don't hear about colonization of our media because our media has been colonized", same with our academia and politics (that quote is from the opening episode of the CBC national televized coffeeklatch "People Talking Back in 1976 - observed by one of the woman in the host group of the Edmonton group at the U. of A......long before the oil companies took over the Alberta media and political culture.
So what to do? I don't know - other than connecting with others with opened eyes and clear minds... I note that lately the b.s. right has been making inroads in Substack.....
Now that few weeks of HTML code-wrangling is hopefully over and resolved, next up on my writing agenda is to get to draft letters to the Guardian' s Canadian correspondent (in Toronto, of course) and whatever US political zines such as the Daily Beast, Mother jones, the Village Voice, and the NYT to get them to go after Chatham Assets Management and the Trumpite Alabamian who own Black Press for heir manipulation of Canadian and BC politics as unwantend and LYING rags worth the stock market going after and crashing their stock.
Fight fire with fire, and money is what has driven the takeover of BC and all of Canada - so what do we do? Why, a "Bonfire of the Vanities" of course - we just have to make sure the right oligarchs are on the bonfire when it burns.
this paper of yours BC History Boy, wll be part of my submission. Alsos to the Salish Sea Current, an independent writers' collective zine based in Bellingham; something we might work out how to start an equivalent for here in BC.....
Wow, thanks for this. Shocking and yet… not shocking.
Thank-you for this, it's very interesting and has confirmed a suspicion I have had for some time that some organization and money was working behind the scenes. My only question is, were all of the people at the blow-up city hall meeting senior citizens? As a senior myself, I do not want to be lumped in with them. By categorizing seniors in one group their many differences and life phases are not acknowleged. In any event, with luck, you too will be a senior citizen one day.
Fair point Cynthia! I do think the overwhelming majority of the concerned citizens are senior citizens, which is why I refer to them that was. I certainly don't think, nor intend to give the impression, that all seniors are at fault.
I have much respect for the elders in our community and sorry if that doesn't come across in my writing. Thanks for the feedback 🙏
Great article Craig. I just have to take issue with your description of Ted Vizzutti being elderly. He’s younger than our grad class of 81 so in effect you are calling a lot of people old, and we still feel young. There’s a lot of other words that could be more fitting.
Fair critique! Thanks for the feedback Monica
A huge wow! I’ve just found you Craig and subscribed. A lifelong Vancouverite here. And love history. I was up in Powell River last year for an “event” which sure had my eyes opened wide…….have you submitted this to any publication? As a history/opinion piece? Maybe you do this already.
Ps never heard of any of this shit. Everyone needs to hear it. And yes, dangerous, small sparks as we know can start a raging fire.🔥
Here's the latest bit of insane madness at the BC Prosperity Project, and my response:
Curtis's Post
The BC Prosperity Project ·
Curtis Stone
·
Instead of playing wack-a-mole with Canadian policies you want to stop, BC independence is an all-in-one way to stop all of it.
Mass migration, woke indoctrination and funding, anti-development, DRIPA and UNDRIP, geo-engineering, income tax, speculative real estate, inflation, climate change policies, funding foreign wars, ect.
Declaring independence is the solution for all of it!
__________________
Michael Cleven
Forced emigration, bonehead indoctrination and stupidity-funding, pro-big-development,, no respect for international standards about indigenous peoples (10% of BC's population and a majority in less-urbanized regions), geo-engineering of the very wrong kind, no taxes to support roads and schools and hospitals, out-of-control inflation as capital avoids a radicalized rabid-right regime, climate change acceleration, and funding foreign wars on US by our rapacious neighbour.
You guys are drinking from the upside-down bottle.