Today’s decision by Adrian Dix to step down as BC NDP leader, pending a leadership election next year, comes as no surprise. The good news for Mr. Dix – to be a bit catty for the moment – is that he stays as Leader of the Opposition, with the salary that goes with it, until some time in 2014.

That he had to resign based on history doesn’t stand up – Gordon Campbell blew the 1996 election, stayed on and became the worst premier in our history. Right wing parties, until Mr. Vander Zalm, have always circled the wagons and – to mix a couple of metaphors – refrained from eating their own whelp.

For the NDP, however, self-immolation is traditional.

This announcement gives the NDP time to focus on its leadership to come, and the party has never been very good at that. The reason is simple: the NDP is a party of principles – which is not to say that any of those principles make any sense  – whereas right wing parties concentrate on winning and let other principles be damned.

The business community doesn’t give a fiddler’s fart what the leader stands for as long as he is being friendly to business at all costs. You will remember how, right after Campbell became premier in 2011, he gave a billion dollars in tax “relief” to the well off.

Replacing Adrian Dix

The candidates for succession to the slightly-less-than-enviable prize that the NDP nest of adders is, are several  – and we may not even know the names of some of them by the time the contest gets seriously out of the starting gate.

The two favourites at this stage are Mike Farnworth and John Horgan. I mention that Mr. Farnworth is gay only because that will be – and perhaps should be – a plus in a party that prides itself on its openness to minorities. Whether or not this bears any electoral problems, I can’t say – it shouldn’t. In addition, Mr. Farnworth has had experience in cabinet, including the senior post as Health Minister. He is also – and this is important  – liked and respected both in and out of his party.

John Horgan is certainly intelligent but has a temper. A tempered temper, so to speak, may be just what the party needs. He carries with him, however, a conviction that might be hard for the NDP to support in the days to come . He supports, evidently without serious reservations, the Liberals’ vision for Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plants – plus the pipelines and fracking that go with them. Since this is the only hope the Liberals have for 2017, that makes things awkward for an NDP leader who agrees with them.

It’s also a problem for the third name always mentioned – George Heyman, former labour leader and former executive director of the environmental organization, the Sierra Club in BC. Heyman’s first problem is he’s not popular with the union movement who believe he laid down when Campbell legislated his members back to work.

His second problem is that he’s an untested rookie and, since the leadership contest will likely be before the Legislature goes back in session, will still be unbloodied before the leadership convention.

There will be others. Somehow dust gets sprinkled into the eyes of no-hopers who always visualize a deadlocked convention with them, somehow, coming up the middle to win – something that rarely happens. The last one I can recall – and this was before conventions were stacked with 24-hour members – was Joe Clark in 1976.

Horgan’s LNG problems

I believe that the odds on favourite will be Farnworth. He’s popular with the caucus and the party and that’s pretty important, to put it mildly. But more importantly, he will be able to corner Horgan on the LNG issues – especially over fracking. Horgan, poor chap, is trapped in the policy of the 2013 election when the NDP – if they stood for anything – were for LNG development with a minimum of study.

Now that the Liberals have staked their government’s future on LNG and mythical “Prosperity” funds, being in favour of this will not be a winner at the convention. Horgan will, no doubt, be babbling, “LNG if necessary but not necessarily LNG” – and he’ll have the experienced and popular Farnworth snapping at him from one side and the kid on “the make”, Heyman, on the other. Heyman, that is, with the strong track record opposing fracking.

This, to my mind, makes Farnworth the winner and also guarantees the usual outcome – the NDP squabbling and divided at the end of the process.

The BC Liberals have the worst attendance record in the BC Legislature since 1976 – especially with this week’s decision to avoid a Fall sitting…again. If they were employees working in the real world, they’d have a tough time holding down a job. In politics, apparently, it’s a different story.

Socreds: 80, Liberals: 51

The Clark Government’s two predecessors differed little in their legislative schedules. From 1976 to 1991, the Socred Government held an average of 80 sessions a year; the NDP, from 1992 to 2000, hosted an average of 78.

The Liberals began their legislative tenure by choosing not to hold a Fall sitting in 2001, setting the tone for years to come. Since 2001, including this year’s abysmal 20 days in the Legislature, they have averaged just 51 days in those hallowed Victoria halls – a 53-56% decrease from their predecessors, according to data crunched by Will Koop of the BC Tapwater Alliance . (see graph below)

His organization is furious that at a such a pivotal moment, with critical issues reshaping the province’s future – from fracking and liquefied natural gas plans to oil pipelines, the $8 Billion proposed Site C Dam, mounting deficit challenges and the mess at BC Hydro –  the government would choose to sit this session out.

Premier Christy Clark says it’s precisely for that reason she can’t be bothered with pesky debate – stating that “building an LNG industry in British Columbia” is her party’s main priority.

For Koop, that excuse doesn’t wash:

[quote]Amongst other pressing issues, this government clearly does not want the public’s elected officials to go on record to debate the serious future environmental consequences, social and economic issues related to the upstream and downstream fracking industry.[/quote]

The following is a private letter, republished with permission, from retired BC NDP cabinet minister Corky Evans to a friend, discussing their party’s recent election failure and uncertain future. Though not intended as a polished manifesto, it should be required reading for anyone interested in rebuilding the NDP.

August 10, 2013

Dear Steve,

Thank you for initiating the dialog about the state of our Party. 100 members with your commitment to change could save us.

We lost an election we could have won. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. The only difference between this one and many in the past was that the pundits and the press told us we would win.

Otherwise, it was pretty much as we remember. We thought we could win. We didn’t.

Of course Adrian must go. His image has been damaged by attack ads the same way Mr. Dion and Mr. Ignatieff were damaged by similar smear campaigns in the recent past. They were both fine people and they both had to leave so that their Party could move on, so must Adrian.

It would constitute huge failure however, if we, the membership, celebrated the departure of our Leader and believed our troubles were resolved.

The first Leader I ever ran for was Bob Skelly. Bob did a terrible job of campaigning. And, I don’t know, but I would wager, that in spite of his troubles he got more of the popular vote than we have received lately.

Indeed, we continue to decline regardless of who we chose as Leader. Getting rid of the Leader is sometimes necessary but it solves nothing except allowing folks to feel that they can begin again.

The only way I can think of to describe our problem is to say the Movement that we were has become the Institution that we are.

The same thing happens to every religion as it turns into a church, every political movement that outlives it’s vision, every business that grows big enough to forget what it started out to accomplish.

The Pope dies, the CEO gets paid to leave, the Leader resigns, and the institutions that they led, precisely because they are institutions, survive and carry on as before.

It seems to me that a movement becomes an institution pretty soon after it spawns a number of people whose well being, financially or psychologically, is dependent on the survival of the organization, rather than its success.

And survive we do.

We survive even if our Leadership candidates sign up bogus membership to get nominated.

We survive even if we cannot attract enough voters to grow or win.

We survive when we have nothing to say to citizens who are not already committed to our way of thinking.

We survive even when we have to get someone else to pay our President.

The people who increasingly dominate positions of leadership electorally or in the Party do not need to win elections for them to remain secure. So secure, in fact, that there are those among us who have never held a job that wasn’t, essentially, political.

Please do not misunderstand my intent. I do not wish to denigrate the folks who dedicate their lives to make us function. They Are Us.

Our problem is not ”who” they are, it is that they exist in critical mass and their voice is perceived to be our voice and their voice is not interesting. It is an institutional voice. It is pretty much like listening to the Ford Motor Company or the BC Medical Association.

I remember when one of the Leaders I worked for asked some guys many of us know to purge our Party of the troublemakers (that was not the word he used.)

They did a good job. We got Slates so the people we didn’t like couldn’t serve in Executive positions. We got Mike Muffins (members with nothing to say who stand in the line at the microphone) at Convention so they couldn’t speak. Candidates got a Message Box and were told not to say what they thought and to stick strictly to only what they were given to say.

The “troublemakers” were sidelined and we became an effective, and boring, machine. Leaders and Leaders staff tell MLA’s what they can and cannot say and punish independent thinking. Or, worse, speaking their mind. We are now a modern political machine, and we sound like one.

We are rarely, anymore, embarrassed. There is no blood on the floor at Convention. We have become a successful Institution and a failed Movement.

The contradiction in this analysis, if analysis it be, is of course that some of this organizational behavior is necessary and some of it even works.

In an age of television many believe that we cannot allow real debate at convention and we cannot have MLA’s saying what they think about stuff because everything, everywhere, is grist for the mill and can be used against us.

I remember the election when every Liberal candidate in BC, including Gordon Campbell, had a sheet of stupid things Corky Evans has said to quote from.

Of course, every quote on the page was taken out of context and was, to me, defensible. But in a time where the sound bite has replaced discourse as the way that people receive ideas, it can be argued that it is better to be boring than to risk being made to look stupid.

I do not know how to fix this. I could not write a tract entitled ”What is to be done,” because I do not know. The thing I do know, though, is that discussion is medicine for screwed up situations. Self-criticism can heal.

The message box, on the other hand, is not discourse. It is poison, like drinking the cool-aid at Jonestown.

I’d like to see us cut everyone a little slack and see if we couldn’t be a bit of a movement again, a bit embarrassing at times but also interesting and current and vibrant and less controlled, less careful, less run by anybody in particular.

This isn’t about Adrian, who I am pretty sure knows what he has to do. It is about us as a Party with a diverse base of support. I doubt very much if we know the details of what it is that we have to do, but I believe we know the spirit of the changes needed. So we best talk.

Thanks,

Corky

This Weekend is the party’s most pivotal Provincial Council meeting ever. Will the NDP really change or will it be more of the same?

Fourteen years ago, I had the privilege to serve in the office of the Minister of Forests with an astute NDP “guru”, a modest but brilliant political thinker and one of the strongest “staffers” in the NDP Government of the day.

His name was Dan Barrett, son of former premier Dave Barrett, whose legacy still resonates to this day.  We were ministerial assistants to David Zirnhelt, now the VP of the BCNDP executive, and I held the distinction of his longest serving MA, a bit of an inside joke.

As Ministerial Assistants in a government under siege, the staffers of the late nineties had an unparalleled camaraderie, and there was a great deal of talent in the backrooms of the NDP then.

In addition to Barrett, I had the privilege to rub shoulders with folks like Adrian Dix, John Horgan and Maurine Kariaginis, all of whom found their way to the front bench of the team. As Ministerial Assistant, I served three different ministers and a Premier, so I also spent significant time with “legends” like Moe Sihota, now the paid NDP party President.

However, that is enough about me – I relay these old details simply to set some context for this commentary as it is the NDPers who never put their name on a ballot that I would like to focus on here, on the eve of the most pivotal Provincial Council meeting in the BC NDP’s history.

Back in my university days, I was a Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) representative, a position that came with the office I was elected to on student council, where I cut my teeth in the wacky world of BC politics.

In those days, the CFS in BC was chaired by a young man everyone agreed was an up and comer. So, seven years later when I landed in Victoria as a newbie staffer I was not surprised to see Brad Lavigne as a senior political staffer, then in the office of Andrew Petter, ushering in massive policy suites like the Forest Practices Code.

Lavigne has had an exemplary career, having done a full tour of duty in Canadian universities before serving BC NDP cabinet ministers and ultimately wrapping up his time in BC on the Ujjal Dosanjh bus, which saw the BC NDP crumble under the worst defeat in the history of the social democrats.

But like Ujjal, Lavigne parachuted into Ottawa and anyone who watched the made-for-TV Movie Jack knows that it was Brad who went on to motivate Layton’s leadership bid and was an instrumental figure throughout Jack’s leadership.

Layton’s team became iconic on the Hill, which catapulted them to the stratosphere of New Democrat “guruism” – and Lavigne stands out among them. A regular power panel member on our state media’s flagship political show “Power and Politics,” Lavigne has never stopped his high-energy push through the halls of power.

He and Layton recruited other players in the NDP, such as Brian Topp and Anne McGrath, who have since become “gurus” in their own right, after propelling Jack to rock star status, or so the narrative goes and the movie portrays.

Lavigne now haunts the halls of Hill and Knowlton, a key division of WPP, the worlds largest most powerful lobby. There, he works alongside other staffers whom I shared time with in the dying days of the BC NDP’s reign, including Jim Rutkowski – whom Hill and Knowlton picked upafter a stint Jim did with the Vancouver Port Authority.

Those of us who worked in the nineties NDP, recognized the heavy hitters of the day, including Lavigne, Rutkowski, Horgan and Dix were going places, and while some chose to take up political careers away from the back rooms,  the ones who took a different path may be less known in BC – yet their impact on provincial and national politics has been just as profound, if not more so.

Those now in the employ of Hill and Knowlton are clearly enjoying time at the commanding heights in this country. Yet, back in the day Dan Barrett and I shared an office in the pointy buildings, I am not sure there were any lifetime New Democrats in such positions of power.

H&K, for anyone unaware, has long been the go-to group for corporate titans and masters of the universe. They delivered such melodramas as the Kuwait liberation effort that saw a Kuwaiti diplomat’s daughter roll out the eye-watering story of incubator babies being turfed to the floor that was the last straw responsible for invoking “Operation Freedom”, which liberated the Kuwaitis from the brutality of the madman, Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein…or so the H&K narrative goes. In the end, it turns out it might of had something to do with the oil.

Which brings me to the most recent BC Election experience.

Mere weeks before the writ was dropped, Brian Topp rolled out the press release that he would indeed be the BC NDP Campaign Manager. The mainstream narrative tells us that Topp hand-picked his “team”, unsurprisingly being the same Layton triumvirate of himself, Lavigne and McGrath. Rutkowski too – so H&K were well placed in the BC NDP War Room of Topp’s choosing.

Days later, Topp rolled out the grand opening of his new shop, Kool Topp & Guy. This reverberated through the circle of politicos who pay attention to this kind of thing. Many congratulations were on offer among their high-level colleagues; however, there was among some of us lowly peripherals a gut-wrenching consternation. What we saw was the crumbling of the inevitable BC NDP win, beginning before our eyes that day.

Topp’s new business partner, Ken Boesenkool is one of Conservative Canada’s top operatives. He is a young, telegenic man with direct ties to the PMO, Manning Institute and other conservative mainstays, including a long association with disgraced former Harper Chief strategist, Tom Flanagan, with whom he co-authored the Alberta Firewall, among many other less than flattering undertakings which delivered power to the Harper Conservatives. And finally the West was “in”.

Boesenkool also did a stint with – you guessed it – Hill and Knowlton, where he had a long list of clients, whom I cannot reveal because he does not discuss them – but it has been well publicized that he did time fighting the good fight for Enbridge.

The shiny new Kool Topp & Guy shingle, hung out days after Topp announced his role as BC NDP Campaign Manager, was a shocker, no doubt. Many were aware that Kool left Christy Clark’s side mere months prior under the cloud of a short lived and rather strange “scandal” that had no paper trail and few details.

Many observers were blindsided by the development of the BC NDP campaign manager teaming up with the architect of the Christy Clark BC liberal revival, mere days before the writ.

There were rumblings – quickly dashed – that included a call for Topp to step down. Concerns raised by bloggers and party supporters fell on deaf ears, as the rank and file were poll-drunk and the Topp-down orchestrated NDP campaign had an iron grip on the Kool-aid jug being liberally poured for everyone,  from the leader on down.

Which brings us to today. This weekend the NDP has its quarterly Provincial Council. The first item of business is the report from the Campaign manager. Bill Tielman,  identified as an NDP strategist, quipped that there “could be recriminations” in a recent Justine Hunter Globe and Mailpiece, suggesting that the heat Topp has taken since the “surprising upset” could be met with significant push-back from Topp`s strategists that occupied the war room.

A full disclosure of who exactly occupied the war room and handled the leader has yet to occur, but at this point, Topp, Lavigne, Mc Grath, Rutkowski, along with high-level elected executive types, Sihota, O’Brien and Zirnhelt have all been identified as key figures in the construction and execution of the campaign in its entirety. However, fundraising seems to have been executed outside of the direct leadership of the war room.

Topp did say weeks ago during some of the debate which ensued while sifting through  the ruins of the BC NDP 2013 election experience, that he intended to “write about the campaign after the leader spoke.” That did not happen and his twitter account has fallen silent since the day the BC Liberal campaign accused him of a conflict of interest – based on his associations with the film industry lobby and the policy being forwarded by the BC NDP Campaign. Not a single tweet from the twit since – the silence has been deafening.

Regardless, the entrails have been pored over in an informal fashion as Dix was quoted saying that an informal NDP review of the party’s election failures is already underway. “There’s lots of reflection taking place right now and I think that’s useful,” Dix claimed recently. Throughout this reflection period we have seen a wide variety of observations, ranging from blaming the apathetic, the Greens, the BC liberal voters and even questioning the polling that clamped down the internal campaign and candidates. But in the end, the one thing everyone agrees on is that the campaign was indeed the reason why BC is still governed by the single most regressive government in history.

Why that is the reality will be further explored as the “Terms of reference” will be set out for a formal review this weekend at Provincial Council. The run-up to this weekend’s gathering of the faithful from fall corners of the Province has already received some harsh yet insightful commentary and the leader is going to be in the hash marks.

The NDP risks squandering a potentially useful exercise if all they do is put Dix in the hash marks, as the 2013 election clearly cannot solely be attributed to him, and doing so may avoid digging deeper to the core of the problem and the generals in the war room whose conflicted interests are at the very heart of the defeat.

The last Provincial Council meeting I attended, my old colleague, Dan Barrett’s father stood up to the mic, delivered one sentence and sat down: “The NDP should change its name, because its no longer new or democratic.”

I am sure Dave Barrett`s observation never rang more true and was never more relevant than it will be at this weekend’s Provincial Council, over ten years later.

Part two of this two-part piece, will be published after we hear from Kool Topp Guy this weekend – and will include the H&K war room damage control report, language and efforts.

Ok, John Horgan (BC NDP Energy critic), now I’m pissed off. You were quoted in the Vancouver Sun this week as saying you’re unhappy that the NDP lost, etc, weep, sob.

Here it is in plain, unadorned English: I TOLD YOU SO! In fact, my advice to you and your party has been constant and goes back to Bob Skelly’s day. The fact is that politics is a blood sport – not just in BC but everywhere and in politics as in baseball. Lou Durocher was right – “nice guys finish last”.

Who the hell made the decision to ignore the Liberals’ appalling record? Defeated candidate Harry Lali, when I spoke to him weeks before the election, agreed with me that the election policy of the NDP was calculated to lose.

Who ran this show? Moe Sihota? Was perpetual loser Gerry Scott back? Or was it former Liberal Government chief of staff/Enbidge lobbyist/bottom pincher Ken Boessenkool?

Yes, I’m going to be a bit self-centred today, but I’m entitled. Who established the nice guy, new petty policy-a-day technique? I called it, with indelicacy but truth, a fart a day. Meanwhile, your opponent stuck to one simple, effective narrative.

Now, Mr. Horgan, to the meat of the matter. Those British Columbians uncommitted to either party were, like me and the Common Sense Canadian, not pulling for you because we love the NDP. For the most part, we didn’t give a rat’s ass for any of the parties. We wanted to save our province from the ravages of large industry, bound and determined to ignore out environment.

Where were you – yes, John, you especially? Where were you on fish farms? Where were you on pipelines? Oil tankers? What of private power?

Let’s deal with the latter for a moment. You know what has happened and continues to happen to our rivers as Independent Power Producers (IPPs) dam them, dry them up as fish try to spawn, then sell their electricity to BC Hydro at double or more the market price. You knew better than most that BC Hydro is technically bankrupt, only alive because it can raise our rates.

Ponder that Mr. Horgan – the jewel in BC’s tiara tossed away, and you and your party virtually leave the issue alone!

Coming out against Kinder Morgan didn’t kill you – it was the timing and manner of Mr. Dix’s announcement that did the damage.

Your position on “fracking” and creation therefrom of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) was bewildering to say the least. The environmental movement around the world and most scientists in this field are urging, “Go slow! Let’s get answers to some very serious concerns before we hurl ourselves into this free-for-all”.

On the economic side of LNG, where is the market going to be? China, which has enough natural gas to last 500 years? The US that’s awash with the stuff? What about our competition – Australia, Poland, Russia, which has the biggest gas reserves in the world?

According to the Premier, the $8 BILLION+ going into Site “C” would be used to supply the LNG industry. And you support that?

In fact, what you and the opposition did, by inference at least, is support Premier Clark’s absurd notion that by 2017 LNG will have us debt free, with $100 Billion or so in a “Prosperity Fund”.

The real point is the NDP spat out issues as if they were of equal importance. As I say, sir, a fart a day.

What you did was let down British Columbians who couldn’t care less about political parties but looked to you to save us from the corporate bulldozer.

In fact, the NDP abandoned the position that oppositions traditionally occupy in a democracy. “The duty”, said Lord Randolph Churchill, “of the opposition is to oppose”. This is the only way full knowledge of issues can be attained. Part of that job is to be a government in waiting – in fact you weren’t even an opposition in waiting.

If it weren’t for this terrible “first past the post” system we have, the alternative government would be the Green Party. They alone of the opposition parties hit the issues.

You owe the people of British Columbia, of all political stripes, a huge apology for a gutless election where the government got a free ride.

The election has been over now for three weeks, and the media has been full of articles dissecting what happened in an attempt to explain what to many came as a shocking surprise.

It is easy to see what happened, if not why, but generally left unsaid is what probably will not happen with the Liberals getting another four years in government.

A friend of mine made note of that right after the results were in, and I think that it puts the whole event in a more accurate perspective than merely discussing how the election was either won or lost, depending on one’s point of view.

As my friend Marco wrote, for the next four years, there will be:

NO public inquiry into the BC Rail and BC Hydro scandals

NO comprehensive public Environmental-Economic Impact Assessment for major resource development projects (pipelines, mines, fracking, etc.)

NO restoration and repair to our damaged public health, emergency and education systems

NO restoration of curtailed Human Rights, Labour Code and Employment Standards, and Freedom of Information laws

NO serious effort to develop a more sustainable, democratic, local community-based economy and job creation (including co-ops, getting away more from oil dependency, etc.)

NO restoration of a fairer dynamic tax code based on the ability to pay, not on who you know or how well you can blackmail.

NO relief from skyrocketing personal debt, lack of retirement security, lack of access to skills training, declining air and water quality, ever worsening poverty and homelessness and chronic high unemployment

NO electoral or election finance reform or efforts to make government bureaucracy and crown agencies more accountable to the public, including the productive union workers who give them reason to exist.

So, how did this happen?  Polling before the election indicated that the public was fed up with the government, and that they would be defeated soundly.  It did not happen, and the reason that most did not see it coming as it did could be because the polls were asking the wrong questions and the election planners were running with misleading data.

There is no guarantee, however, that even if the right questions were asked and the data was different the opposition would have been able to unseat the government.  It may be that the organization as presently constituted cannot win elections because they are adverse to running the kind of campaign necessary to achieve victory.

The polls are probably telling us what people are thinking, but not so much how they will vote, or more precisely if they will turn their feelings into votes.  The fact is that from the middle of their first term onward the public was generally unhappy with the government.  The opposition lost three elections in a row that were theirs’ to win because they could not turn that dissatisfaction into votes.

For the last thirty years the province has seen a steady decrease in the percentage of eligible voters actually casting a ballot, with the exception of a minor increase in 2005.  The 2013 election had a turnout of just over fifty-two percent of registered voters, but not all eligible voters even bother to register.  The turnout of all eligible voters was just over forty-nine percent.

The government won re-election with just under twenty-two percent of the vote of those estimated to be eligible to vote.  The message here being that most voters, though unhappy with the government, also do not trust the opposition nor the system, and don’t bother to participate.

The root of current dissatisfaction might lay in the results of the 2001 election where after five years of concentrated negative attacks on the NDP government the current government won a landslide victory.  Unfortunately for them their campaign was more hype than reality, and instead of governing with the interests of the province in mind they proceeded to rip up social contracts and sell off public assets. They dropped in the polls.

The reason the opposition has been unable to capitalize on this situation may have roots in their 2000 leadership contest where the populist wing of the party was crushed in this rather unsavory event by party power brokers.  They lost the 2001 election which was no surprise, but losing it by the margin that they did was.

They continued in control of the party, managing to lose two elections with Carole James, and lost more credibility with the ham-handed way that they managed the uprising against Carole dating from at least the 2009 convention.  Now they have lost an election that was more than theirs’ to win, primarily because a majority of the people who do vote do not trust them, and much of the majority who do not vote, won’t because they do not have a good incentive to go to the polls.

What will happen in 2017, or possibly before, will depend upon whether the government can clean up its act and regain popular support (in the thirty polls taken by Angus Reid between August 2009 and May 2013 the government only led or was tied in three of them), and whether the opposition can clean house and energize the public to see them as a credible alternative.

Jerry West publishes The Record in Gold River, BC.