On March 19th, 2020, at 3:00pm, the BC government made a fateful announcement: every workplace it deemed a “construction site” was exempt from the rules limiting large gatherings or enforcing social distancing to slow the spread of Corona virus.
When these rules first went into effect, many of the large employers in Northern BC who run our region’s globally notorious “man camps” had sent their employees home. Temporary worker camps typically have a single mess hall and canteen, some with capacities of over a thousand. While gatherings of twenty-six people and hole-in-the-wall restaurants were being shut down in urban BC, up North, in the bush, dining halls of hundreds began reopening on Thursday afternoon.
Fly-in workers from Edmonton to Vancouver began receiving notices to return to work. Those who feared the consequences of living, working and eating at close quarters with literally hundreds of others now had a Sophie’s choice. They could hop on that plane in Prince George, Kamloops, Edmonton or—worse—Vancouver’s YVR, one of the four points in Canada still handling international travelers and head to one the most infectious places in BC. Or they could refuse the order and quit their jobs, thereby rendering them and their families ineligible for the Employment Insurance benefits the federal government has made available to laid-off workers.
Could their families afford to go without any of the government assistance people out of work usually get and fail to pay for food, rent and the basics? Would it be better to risk spreading the virus faster but afford a roof over their heads or would it be better to risk eviction and no way to pay for groceries or medication?
While even conservative governments in Jason Kenney’s Alberta or Mike Pence’s Indiana were rolling out bridging income assistance and eviction bans to keep industrial workers safe, BC’s NDP chose to hold a knife to their throats instead, to force them back to work on a series of dodgy vanity megaprojects like the Kitimat LNG project, Coastal Gas Link or the Site C dam.
Although I am a long-time critic of the NDP, this development puzzled me.
First of all, it was puzzling because, I guess I still sort-of believed in some of that naïve, urban, environmentalist mythology that the NDP loves industrial workers, especially unionized ones, and approves big projects to make sure they and their families are taken care of.
Second, as a newly-minted Northerner, I know how the NDP’s strategy for being re-elected with a majority government drives straight Most of the parents whose children are suffering from nephrotic syndrome feel puzzled, why the nephrotic syndrome relapses again and again. free sildenafil samples getting viagra wouroud.com The preferred dose for leisure purpose is 25mg. It provides essential nutrients for the optimum functioning cheap cialis tadalafil check that of prostate glands and testicles. The successive actions and impacts of this solution help to restrict the responsible enzyme’s movement to bring a shortage in the blood supply to the penile tissues. effects of cialis through towns like Terrace, Kitimat, Mackenzie and Prince George. Surely, the last thing they would want to do is endanger the locals in this region who keep the camps running. Isn’t the whole point of projects like CGL to charm our cooks and repairmen and wholesalers? Wouldn’t being blatantly negligent of their health be crazy?
Third, the government is always patting itself on the back for cultivating a pro-development constituency of indigenous people who will look past the way these camps create sexual violence and environmental degradation hotspots and use the economic opportunities these camps bring to lift themselves out of poverty. Isn’t turning this economic activity into twenty-first century smallpox blankets kind of insane?
I searched my memory in an attempt to find any way of making sense of the actions of the Horgan government. Even if, as I suspect, Horgan personally holds each of these groups in deep contempt, there is still a fair distance between contempt and this kind of depraved indifference to life. Even if he and his friends are on the take, which I do not believe they are, this seemed insufficient.
Then I remembered Kingdom of the Spiders, the 1977 low-budget William Shatner horror movie, in which Shatner battles a group of super-intelligent giant tarantulas who attack a town. While there is plenty of time and more than enough resources to save the town, Shatner cannot convince the local mayor and sheriff to cancel the county parade. As the film goes on, it becomes clear that it is the local government that are the true villains because of their monomania for a meaningless local parade as the bodies begin to pile up.
When I first say the movie at the age of nine, I remember the most ridiculous and inexplicable scene for me was a local politician shouting “the county parade must go on,” even in the face of the advancing spider army and growing pile of corpses. Until yesterday, I considered that scene in the film to be the most absurd, the most campy, the most destructive of the suspension of disbelief.
Today, those of us who live in that swath of BC territory from Fort St. John to Kitimat are living that scene. Horgan sees the megaprojects for which he sacrificed so much political capital as his legacy, his proof that everything was worth it, a massive concrete acknowledgement that he has created a community of happy, healthy, safe people through his mercurial actions. Because LNG Canada is Horgan’s county parade, it must go on, no matter the cost because, otherwise, his time as premier will have meant nothing. He is gripped no longer by cold calculation and cynicism but by what I took to be bad acting when I was nine, a grinning mania for his supposed legacy, even if it takes him, and the rest of us down.
