Kootenay Crust

We are in a time when we look back and see the white picket fences of yore, when 2.5 kids, 1.33 dogs, a cat and two cars adorned the yard of a home ‘owned’ by a together mom and dad who worked as a team for the betterment of the family unit.

We are in a time when the old way of conducting an economy is faltering. In our region, forestry jobs continue to drip through the grate, like blood from a killing floor. Yes, Teck Cominco is cranking out jobs, benefitting many regional families. Thank goodness for those jobs.

Our tourism industry is one day okay, the next dismal. It boggled my mind last year whenever I ventured north to the Columbia Valley, the longest-running and most complete tourism locale, in terms of volume of activities offered, in our region, and spoke with people about how ‘business was going.’

One person would enthusiastically tell me they were having their best summer yet, while the next person would look down at their shoes and mumble about being lucky to survive to the next summer season. In short, tourism is hit and miss right now, as the world’s economy continues to wobble and fail.

Old systems are dying. Some are long dead already, the crash of 2008 being the final shot that stopped the kicking.

The region’s construction and land sales industries, hotter than blazes at the turn of the century, fueled by the seemingly endless flood of money from ‘mini Saudi Arabia’ to our east, have dried up to the point that only the most prepared businesspeople are still moving forward. Many in those industries have had to look elsewhere for work, or change their occupations, or at least expand to something else while the downturn remains turned down.

There are glimpses of hope. I am not trying to be morose and completely negative. I am simply trying to point out how the old way of doing things needs to be placed gently on the shelf of a museum and a new model needs to be trotted out.

The computer industry allowed for the creation of an exciting new aspect of economy back in the early 1980s and it has grown to the point where its creators are among the wealthiest people alive. It is the future and most people get that now.

Our world needs to stop in its tracks, take a deep breath, and start moving forward again with a few new templates in place to allow for new industry to emerge.

There is a watershed issue that, if the out-of-touch old fools and dinosaurs in Ottawa could ever stay awake long enough, or keep away from the public trough slurping longing enough to begin to understand, that  would help turn things around a bit.

It is marijuana legalization. Not decriminalization. Why go half way when going all the way is needed?

The legalization of marijuana would create a new industry, that is already chugging along as Canada’s largest black market industry, which fuels violent gangs that happily provide ‘product’ for the millions of Canadians who enjoy a puff of cannabis now and then. More to the soul of it all, there are many, many thousands of Canadians who grow their own bud for their own enjoyment, and that of a select group of friends and ‘customers.’ It isn’t just bikers who are distributing the stuff. They’re just the ones who give the rest of the weed dealers bad names. Most weed dealers I’ve known have been solid citizens, who pay taxes (save for what they earn from their agricultural ways), vote (some even for Conservatives), raise families and are the nicest, most grounded and earnest people you could wish to know.

The legalization of marijuana and the creation of a new industry, which would/should be handled by the government in the same manner it controls booze sales/production, would inject vast sums of new money into government coffers. At the same time, less money would be spent on law enforcement agencies hunting down Ma and Pa Hydroponic operations, there would be less dirty money available for gangs (remember what re-legalizing alcohol did to the prohibition era gangs? Oh right, they started peddling drugs instead! D’oh!) and there would be fewer people in our jails, or more accurately, clogging up our court systems over small, stupid charges that will be viewed by generations in the future with giggling fits of intellectual superiority.

Recent polls in Canada have shown that at least two-thirds of Canadians support legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.

Yet the over-crowded clown car that is Ottawa, driven by a loopy, power crazed control freak who was rescued off the Reform Party flatbed trailer when it overturned going too fast around Big Top Circus Ring Two, and rose to prominence as a pseudo Diefenbaker and wannabe Mulroney, and his cronies just passed Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, last Tuesday (March 13).

Among the elements in this Act are harsher mandatory jail sentences for minor marijuana offenses.

Here we go rampaging backwards again. The Act was passed on a 154 to 129 vote; reflective entirely on the Conservative majority in the House. And God help any Conservative MP who would vote against it. Picture a scene from an Austin Powers movie, with Dr. Evil about to dispense ‘evil justice’ on a turncoat. I’d prefer to think of that turncoat as Will Ferrell, who would give play-by-play after the floor opens and he falls, slathered entirely in meat sauce, into a pit of starving, rabid toy poodles.

Of course I am being silly. How can I not be? I am merely reflecting Ottawa’s latest shining example of how they truly are an out-of-control clown car belting down Canada’s slowly rotting byways.

For example, the Safe Streets and Communities Act is only the ‘short title.’ The Act’s full title is (and I am not making this up or trying to be funny): An Act to Enact the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act and to Amend the State Immunity Act, the Criminal Code, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the Corrections and Conditional Release Act, the Youth Criminal Justice Act, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and Other Acts.”

WTF? Come again? Oh, the Safe Streets and Communities Act. Why didn’t you just say? Why’d you have to go on and on about it like that? What are you? A bunch of weed fried 20 somethings?

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association  says this about the omnibus Bill: “these changes set out for the Canadian criminal justice system – jail more often, for longer, with more lasting consequences – is a dangerous route that is unsupported by the social science evidence and has already failed in other countries.  Indeed, the research suggests that putting an individual in jail for longer will actually increase the likelihood of re-offending.  It’s hard to see how this Bill will make streets and communities safer.  What it will do is needlessly increase the number of people in prison, skyrocketing costs and imposing unjust, unwise and unconstitutional punishments.  This is exactly the kind of policy Canada doesn’t need.”

Stephen Harper’s vision for Canada is apparently the same as the Republican Party in America. Never mind the fact the Republicans, based on the hilariously shabby quality of candidates trying to get the party thumbs up to take on Barack Obama and Joseph Biden is indicative of how that party needs to have a paradigm shift in direction, Stevo and troops want to just blindly march off the same cliff at Head Smashed in Trough Oink Jump.

“I know what we need in Canada,” Steven may have said one day, while ducking out from reporters at Parliament Hill and shouting at a few minor backbenchers, “Let’s build more prisons and fill them with reprobates and scum. Let’s drive the national (omni)bus forward, but backwards! Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do! Iiieeee! How did that journalist get so close to me!”

Bill C-10 is just another example of the disturbing trends occurring in Ottawa. If you really want to feel the chill winds of oppression and sweeping losses of civil rights, dig into Bill C-30, the (currently) short-titled: Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act.

Just where the hell is it you want to take us Mr. Harper?

The 1950s have been done. McCarthy is now viewed as a sick creep. Establishing a police state and ignoring the majority of FACTS about pretty much everything, in a time when our world is more connected and potentially more informed (or misinformed) than ever before simply shows your disdain for the average Canadian and for your country, which knows better than you do – about pretty much everything, apparently.

It’s time to wake up from your white picket fence reverie Mr. Prime Minister. Those days are done. They can come back again, but it won’t be from the sweat on brows of men wielding batons and chanting archaic dogmas that ran out of steam in the mid 1980s.

Here’s a novel idea. Legalize marijuana, establish a paradigm shift in our economic base, re-channel the money (estimated at about $1 billion a year) spent on keeping pot illegal toward tracking down and prosecuting child porn proponents and collectors, or going after meth labs and other far more dangerous substances than marijuana – and we all win.

The jobs created in the Kootenays alone would be enough to compensate for those lost in the forest industry and then some. The supplemental jobs created would allow families to still work in the tourism industry and be able to afford a mortgage. Imagine a time when residents in the Columbia Valley or Fernie or Kimberley are buying more homes than rich people from Calgary buying second or third homes!

I am not saying legalizing pot would be a save-all. Not at all. And I am not saying that pot doesn’t come with dangers and risks. It does, just not as many as booze, which translates into massive tax dollars, and massive social costs. Pot would need to be regulated like booze and be treated like booze.

What we need in the East Kootenay, and everywhere else in Canada, are jobs that pay enough money to allow families to exist – to allow the middle class to re-acquire it’s vitally important place as the strong, beating heart of a successful nation.

Amenity migration and tapping into the high tech industry is a heck of a good start. Would you rather sit at a computer all day with a sprawling view of Fisher Peak and The Steeples out your window, or see a smoggy city haze hiding the sea of buildings from your window in (pick a city), with a 90 minute commute your reward to end your day?

Imagination, heart, thought, awareness of facts, awareness of what’s worked and hasn’t worked elsewhere in the world, and the elimination of tiny-minded conservative views of such things as marijuana and prostitution, and legalizing that which simply will not go away no matter how stiff the penalties and fines or ferocity of a ‘war,’ may help usher us forward, with our eyes looking ahead, not back.

It’s time you snapped out of it, Harper. You are losing your grip on the Canadian public – that was clear in the dynamic shift in the last election. Your sweeping majority was more about Liberal Party incompetence than Canadians embracing an old school conservative bent.

That bent is going to run nose first into a social media tsunami one of these days and the conservatives will find themselves where the Liberals are now.

And believe it or not, that is bone-freezingly disconcerting to me. First and foremost, I am a Western Canadian who has spent his 48 years of life feeling the disdain from Ottawa. I have hated the Liberal/eastern centric lunacy that has kept this nation at odds since I was old enough to understand how the politic game works. I am a Manitoban who had to leave Manitoba to find work thanks, in several parts, to the silly bugger games Ottawa has played over the decades.

The seemingly never-ending git-centric idiocy of Ottawa has returned in flaming full glory now that we once again have a majority government.

And Bills C-10 and C-33 are the latest examples of shrill, uncompromising righteousness that has kept us mired in the same old – that keeps looking backwards.

The paradigm we need in this country is to turn around and move forward, with our eyes on the horizon, and not on the past.

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW

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