Election winners: A poet, a prosecutor and a partier in a Prius

Dean Fortin won easy re-election as mayor of Victoria, though two incumbent councillors he endorsed endured a surprising defeat. Chad Hipolito photograph for the Globe and Mail.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 21, 2011

VICTORIA

Scenes from an election:

The news left John Luton crestfallen. He had lost his seat on Victoria city council. At 57, he wondered aloud about his future employment.

“I’m not afraid of hard work,” he said, before noting, “It’s a time of life when it can be very hard to find a job.”

All around him, people were celebrating the re-election of Victoria mayor Dean Fortin and two members of what was billed as Dean’s Team — councillors Pam Madoff and Marianne Alto. Mr. Luton and Lynn Hunter, a former member of Parliament, were two members of the team who lost their re-election bids.

Mr. Luton lingered at Mr. Fortin’s victory celebration at the Union Pacific Coffee Co. to thank volunteers.

He was in the midst of contemplating his future when interrupted by Ben Isitt, 33, an academic and author who had just won election to council.

Mr. Isitt grabbed his right hand.

“You were the part of the Dean Team that I most wanted to work with,” Mr. Isitt said.

As they continued their exchange, the ebullient Mr. Isitt pumped Mr. Luton’s hand again and again.

Mr. Luton offered a wan smile. He then put on his helmet and reflective vest to cycle home alone in the dark.

* * *

Victoria is still small enough that some campaigns operate from the kitchen table.

After the polls closed, Victoria councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe and her husband Phil, a longtime bus driver, parked on a street in Chinatown around the corner from where her family once operated a store selling caulk boots to loggers. (It is now a tattoo parlour.) The couple listened to the results on the radio.

After her re-election was announced, they held a two-person victory party in their Prius. Then, they got out and walked a block to join the throng at the Fortin celebration.

***

The other two new councillors in Victoria are restaurateur Shellie Gudgeon and Lisa Helps, whose name doubles as a campaign slogan.

* * *

In neighbouring Oak Bay, a pleasant municipality described as being behind a Tweed Curtain, the seasonal pleasures of leaf-raking and strolling a high street redolent with roasting chestnuts have been disturbed by the unseemliness of a competitive electoral race.

Mayor Christopher Causton, who lost a campaign for a seat in Parliament earlier this year, decided to retire after 15 years of wielding the gavel at council. Mr. Causton was known for showing up on the doorstep of every new resident to bring them official greetings.

His retirement pitted council veterans Nils Jensen and Hazel Braithwaite in a contest for the mayor’s chair.

A major issue in the race — nuisance deer.

Mr. Jensen, a Crown prosecutor, defeated his council rival by 3,197 votes to 2,769.

His campaign website features an impressive resumé, yet neglects to mention his foray into provincial politics. Though not known as a New Democrat, Mr. Jensen emerged as a challenger for the provincial party leadership eight years ago. On the first ballot, he finished second to eventual winner Carole James.

The Oak Bay council poll was topped by Tara Ney, the daughter of the late Frank Ney, a swashbuckling mayor who dressed as a sabre-waving pirate to promote the bathtub races that made Nanaimo famous. Ms. Ney is more superhero than buccaneer — she once earned a commendation from the Governor General for alerting a neighbouring family to a house fire. Among the achievements listed on her website was convincing the local Starbucks to open early at 5:30 a.m. so that she could begin her day’s work.

* * *

In Saanich, Frank Leonard held on the mayor’s chair despite a stiff challenge from former NDP MLA David Cubberley. Fun fact: Mr. Leonard’s infant son with Jackie Ngai, a former councillor, is named Atticus. Atticus Finch is the lawyer hero of Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

* * *

Paul Reitsma once again placed his name before the voters of Parksville, where he served as mayor from 1987 to 1996 before winning election to the Legislature.

“I think that those without some baggage have not traveled much on life’s journey,” he said during the campaign.

As a Liberal MLA, he had been caught by the local newspaper writing letters to the editor under fake names. The exposé generated the most memorable headline in recent B.C. newspapering history: “MLA Reitsma is a liar and we can prove it.” He resigned on the cusp of becoming the first politician in the Commonwealth to be recalled by voters.

Mr. Reitsma comeback failed, as he took just 749 votes. Chris Burger won the mayoralty with 2,355.

* * *

Port McNeill mayor Gerry Furney, a poetry-writing Irishman who has held elected office in the Vancouver Island logging town for 43 years, held off a challenge from a councillor. Furney took 572 votes to Shelley Downey’s 394.

Last year, His Worship released “Popcorn for Breakfast,” a volume of rhyming verse. The title poem describes a hockey father seeking morning nourishment from arena vending machines:

“(O)f the junk food I ate there first/ Popcorn for breakfast was surely the worst./ The coffee was stale, the hot chocolate cold,/ Sandwiches tasteless except for the mould.”

He’s also written about logger’s equipment: “It’s sad that men in fancy suits/ Don’t know much about caulk boots.”

He’s no Seamus Heaney, but he has a certain North Island charm.

B.C.'s last Conservative MLA muses on life in the wilderness

Victor Stephens (left) celebrates his 1978 byelection victory in Oak Bay with Dr. Scott Wallace, whom he succeeded as MLA. Stephens is the last Conservative to have been elected to the B.C. Legislature.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 20, 2011

VICTORIA

The last man to have been elected to the B.C. Legislature as a Conservative is the answer to a trivia question.

Victor Stephens, a lawyer, won a byelection in the province’s wealthiest riding in 1978, only to be defeated the following year. He soon after quit as party leader.

His party has wandered in the wilderness for decades, as one obscure leader after another failed to revive the party of Sir Richard McBride and Simon Fraser Tolmie.

Victor Stephens

The Conservatives are back in the news under the leadership of John Cummins, a former member of Parliament who is stumping the province to re-establish his party as a right-of-centre alternative to the governing B.C. Liberals. In June, he pressed the flesh at a meet-and-greet event at a steakhouse in Williams Lake. Earlier this month, he toured Vancouver Island with stops at golf clubs in Chemainus and Port Alberni. Last week, his party launched a website and a radio advertising campaign against a gas tax.

It feels like this much fuss has not been made about the Conservatives since the war years and the glory days of Royal Leatherington Maitland.

Mr. Stephens quietly cheers on the effort to resuscitate a party with a name of greater historical resonance than electoral success.

“We’ve tried a number of times but haven’t succeeded yet,” he said. “Sooner or later, I guess we’ll win.”

The former leader turned 80 earlier this year. He long ago dropped from the political scene and is now so far removed from the hustle-bustle of city life that he can only be reached by satellite phone.

“I’m retired from practicing law,” he said, his voice breaking up in the stratosphere. “Bought 400 acres of forest land up near Boston Bar in the Nahatlatch River Valley. My brother and I have developed it. We’ve put in an RV resort and a three-hole golf course, built our own homes.”

The picturesque valley is home to such predators as wolves, cougars, coyotes, and bears (grizzly and black), so perhaps a spell in politics was good preparation for his retirement in the wilderness.

Mr. Stephens was born in Calgary to a blacksmith who had been wounded in action in France during the Great War. Victor attended the University of British Columbia, where he competed as a miler and cross-country runner. (One of his teammates was Jev Tothill, a future leader of the B.C. Liberals.) He went into law keen to help individuals being confronted by banks, insurance companies, or large corporations.

After a friend died suddenly of a heart attack, Mr. Stephens convinced his wife and three children, aged 10 to 14, to sell all their possessions and to drop out from civilization for a “Robinson Crusoe year in the New Hebrides” (now Vanuatu). The lawyer worked as a native advocate representing islanders facing criminal charges in court.

Back in British Columbia, he was encouraged to succeed Dr. Scott Wallace as party leader and to contest his Oak Bay seat in a byelection. Mr. Stephens won the constituency with 38.5 per cent of the vote. The victory party was held at the local Boy Scout hall.

A year later, he led the Conservatives in a B.C. election in which only Socreds and New Democrats won seats. During the campaign, which was held during a national election, he squabbled with Joe Clark, the federal Progressive Conservative leader. In the end, the B.C. Conservatives’ share of the vote increased modesty, to five per cent, but he lost the party’s lone seat, finishing in a disappointing third place. The B.C. Conservatives have not won a seat since.

“I gave everything I had. But the timing was bad, that’s all,” he said.

“There was a great fear of splitting the vote between the right-wing parties and allowing the NDP to get in. That was pretty much insurmountable.

“That might not be the case now.”

After returning to law, he watched his party slowly unravel. His successor as leader quit to cast his lot with the Western separatists. It has been a rough 33 years for die-hard B.C. Conservatives.

Even Mr. Stephens has let his membership lapse. He no longer has the stomach for politics.

“The law is an honourable profession,” he said. “Politics is not.”

1925: Victoria Cougars bring home the Stanley Cup

This photo of the 1924-25 Victoria Cougars is listed with a $1,000 opening bid at a Classic Collectibles auction.  

CBC Radio's On the Island host Gregor Craigie interviews Tom Hawthorn about the glories of the Victoria Cougars, Stanley Cup champions in 1925:

In 1925, Victoria was gripped by hockey fever. The Montreal Canadiens were in town to battle for the Stanley Cup. Fans began lining up at a ticket office on View Street at 3 a.m.

The “rush for pasteboards,” a newspaper reported, resulted in “fights, fainting scenes, attacks upon ticket sellers, near smashing of windows, and other things.”

The Cougars played out of Patrick Arena along the streetcar line on Cadboro Bay Road in Oak Bay. The 4,000-seat building was home to such stars as Jack Walker, Frank Foyston, and goaltender Hap Holmes. The top player was square-jawed Frank Fredrickson, a gifted scorer who had survived the sinking of his troop ship during the First World War. He won an Olympic gold medal with his hometown Winnipeg Falcons, a squad of military veterans of Icelandic heritage. Though born in Winnipeg, Frank did not learn English until entering school at age six. His parents only spoke Icelandic at home.

Cougars manager Lester Patrick was a hockey genius, whose many innovations are today’s fundamentals.He introduced the blue line, forward passing, substitutions during play.

Those five Cougars have all been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

Victoria beat Montreal three games to one to claim the Stanley Cup. “The skated like fiends,” reported the Victoria Daily Times, “passed the puck like masters, shot like machine-guns, and their defence was as hard to penetrate as the side of a battleship.”

A jubilant mayor presented the players with engraved watches at a victory banquet.

The cup itself, in those days, a bowl atop a modest base, was placed on display at a downtown jewelry. Later, Patrick kept it at his Oak Bay home. His two mischievous boys, Muzz and Lynn, used a nail to scratch their names on the inside of the bowl. They later both had their names engraved on the Cup in the usual fashion.

The Cougars lost the Cup the following season to the Montreal Maroon, the last time a non-NHL team challenged for the storied trophy. A few weeks later, Patrick sold the team to business interests in Detroit. The Detroit Cougars became the Detroit Falcons before becoming the Detroit Red Wings.

For decades, the city’s greatest sporting triumph went unheralded. In 2001, a cairn was unveiled on Cadboro Bay Road outside Oak Bay High. Across the street, where now stand two modest apartment blocks, a Victoria team once won the Stanley Cup.

Desert battle sites familiar to veteran of Libyan campaign

Peter Bunn examines a model of an American-built Sherman tank. Bunn survived three tank strikes in action during the Second World War. Globe photographs by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 11, 2011

VICTORIA

A headline reads: Allied air strikes pound Libya.

The story could have appeared in a newspaper published today. Or 70 years ago.

Once again, war rages across the parched plains of North Africa. For a handful of surviving veterans, the place names recall distant battles — Tobruk and Tripoli, Brega and Benghazi.

Years ago, we learned of war from newsreels shown at cinemas. Today, we watch live action from the front on the Internet.

Peter Bunn, 89, squints at today’s television news broadcasts, seeing if he can spot familiar landmarks in a far-off land in which he and other Allied soldiers faced off against Germany’s Afrika Korps.

“I know every square inch of that desert,” he said. “I fought right where they’re fighting.”

Born in South London, he volunteered for the Second World War at age 19, serving with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers. How did his war go?

“I was at the First Battle of El Alamein and then the big battle and then I went through right on to Algiers and I went on to Italy and ended the war in Austria,” he said. “I had a good run."

Only later does Mr. Bunn describe three harrowing escapes, any one of which could have left him buried beneath a grey stone in a Commonwealth war grave.

He came to Canada after the war, establishing himself here as a small general contractor specializing in renovating heritage buildings. He served for 19 years as a councillor for the municipality of Oak Bay, once making an unsuccessful run for the provincial Legislature.

The long years in office are remembered for advocating greater accessibility. He raised the issue after his wife found she could not use the public washrooms at a local beach while in a wheelchair. Entrances were eventually widened.

Now a widower, Mr. Bunn uses a motorized scooter to travel from his apartment the few blocks to the main shopping street of Oak Bay.

Seven decades ago, he joined a mechanized cavalry unit, eager to avoid the foot soldier’s burden of long marches. He was a radio operator aboard a tank, his duties including responsibility for feeding shells into the big gun.

He remembers the desert as a cruel battleground — relentless afternoon sun followed by the chill of night.

At El Alamein, he was aboard a British Crusader tank when a German artillery shell disabled one of the caterpillar tracks. In the middle of a firefight, his tank could no longer move forward, or backward, a sitting target on a moving battlefield.

(Using a fighter’s salty language, he further described the tank’s limited mobility. “Theoretically,” he explained, “we could go round and round in a circle until we disappeared up our own asses.”)

The crew was lucky the tank had not caught fire.

For supper, he opened a can of beans with a jackknife, gulped from the remaining supply of warming water. There was nothing else to do.

“You just bloody well sit there for eight hours in a tin box with the temperature well over 100 waiting to be killed.”

Under cover of night, a rescue truck hauled his disabled tank away from the front.

Bunn learned to ski after the war.

Later, in the Tunisian desert, his tank was hit again. Once again, his crew was lucky the tank did not “brew up,” the colourful description for the horrific prospect of a tank catching fire.

Later still, while fighting in Italy, his American-built Sherman tank, “a Chevy with armour,” was knocked out by enemy fire. He had survived his third direct strike with not so much as a scratch.

At war’s end, after four years inside a tank, he had the further good fortune of being assigned to a military training centre at Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the future site of a Winter Olympics. He learned to ski, an unlikely skill for someone who spent much of his war on the shifting sands of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia.

He does not recognize the kind of battles being fought in the Libyan desert.

“Half the vehicles of the rebels are Toyota trucks with rocket launchers welded to the floor,” he said. “It looks so absurd to me.”

Trooper Bunn’s war resembled that of the Desert Rats later made famous by Hollywood. Today’s sequel with jerry-rigged fighting vehicles looks like a Mad Max movie.


Listen to Peter Bunn describing his war experiences for The Memory Project here.

Blethering Place serves its last cup o' tea

Eating at the Blethering Place was like visiting your dotty aunt for lunch. Photographs by Deddeda Stemler.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
January 31, 2011

VICTORIA

The Union Jack has been lowered over the Blethering Place Tea Room for the final time.

The banner flew over a landmark restaurant in Oak Bay, a municipality whose borders are teasingly described as the Tweed Curtain.

The Blethering Place, where tour buses stopped and the Galloping Gourmet recorded two episodes of his television cooking program, served its last scone and poured its last cuppa on Sunday.

After three decades of helping convince American tourists that Victoria is an outpost of Merry Olde England, the owner is closing the doors. The city’s “favourite faux Tudor tearoom,” as it has been called, is to be replaced by new owners who have in mind a modern bistro.

“It was an oasis,” said Ken Agate, the 66-year-old proprietor who lives in an apartment above the restaurant overlooking Oak Bay Avenue, the local High Street. “It’s not about being fine dining. It’s about being comfortable and welcome.

“It wouldn’t matter if you sat here all day. You can bring the baby. You don’t need a reservation. You don’t even have to eat.”

The restaurant has been packed this week, as old-time customers returned to sample such dishes as Welsh rarebit, shepherd’s pie, bangers and mash, and a breakfast item billed as “eggs Benedict Arnold.”

While online reviews of the cuisine can kindly be described as mixed, the room earned accolades over the years from travel writers for the Seattle Times (“beloved and venerable”) and the Los Angeles Times (“lots of local ‘old ducks’ chattering away”).

Diners sat in a room filled with such bric-a-brac as dolls and lesson books, toffee tins and biscuit boxes, packaging for blancmange and mushy peas. A portrait of Winston Churchill shared a wall with two Union Jacks.

The decor consisted of “oak panelling, lace curtains, seersucker tablecloths,” the New York Times once noted, while the clientele “look as if they have emerged from the background of an Agatha Christie mystery novel.”

Tea was served in pots covered by crocheted cozies. It was like eating at your dotty aunt’s place.

Mr. Agate bought the restaurant on a whim. He saw the tea room, thought, “I could do that,” and walked in to buy the business. The owner declined, but that very night Mr. Agate got a call from the owner’s wife. Over time, Mr. Agate expanded the space to take over an adjacent grocery and realtor’s office.

He had not been a restaurateur before taking over the tea room, though his family had dairy expertise. Mr. Agate was born in the Fijian coastal village of Navua, where his father introduced ice cream to the tropical archipelago. He grew up in Palmerston North on New Zealand’s North Island, where an early job at a department store led to work as a traveling salesman. He married a hairdresser and eventually owned three salons, which were sold to finance a relocation to Vancouver Island.

He took over the restaurant on the first day of 1981, when, as he puts it, “I got into the beautiful rut of the Blethering Place.”

The tea room took its name from a Scottish word for “voluble senseless talking.”

One day, he spotted among the diners Graham Kerr, the popular cook known by his television audience as the Galloping Gourmet. Mr. Kerr had begun his media career in New Zealand, so the two hit it off, and soon after two episodes for the chef’s syndicated program were taped in the tea room.

The tea room shared a block with such businesses as the Penny Farthing pub and the Tudor Sweet Shoppe, which contribute to the neighbourhood’s sense of British heritage. Yet, Oak Bay’s exclusive Uplands neighbourhood was designed by American landscape architect John Charles Olmsted, while other subdivisions were planned according to principles outlined by American sociologist Clarence Perry.

The Union Jack that once flew over the restaurant, shredded by winter winds, has found a home in Washington state. A vexillologist in the city of Battle Ground, north of Vancouver in Clark County, collects distressed banners. The Union Jack is tattered by weather, not war, an appropriate keepsake for Battle Ground, which takes its name for a site on which an anticipated battle did not take place.

The Blethering Place, where tour buses stopped and where Graham Kerr taped two episodes of The Galloping Gourmet, was a landmark on Oak Bay Avenue.

Tweed Curtain sets apart a riding with an independent streak

An old car and a cup of tea capture life on Oak Bay Avenue.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 20, 2010

VICTORIA

The Tweed Curtain runs along Foul Bay Road, a dividing line of myth and imagination separating ordinary Victoria from the enclave of Oak Bay.

Behind the Tweed Curtain can be found a last bastion of the British empire, where high tea is enjoyed on a High Street. In the three-block long stretch of shops known as the Oak Bay Village, a Union Jack flutters above the Blethering Place Tea Room. The restaurant is a few steps from the Penny Farthing pub and the Tudor Sweet Shoppe, the spelling a bit twee even for a purveyor of fine comestibles of the chocolate variety.

The shopping district offers antiques and art galleries, bakeries and bookstores, a toy store and a crafts shop.

Every summer, along this stretch, a parade of antique vehicles and marching bands trundles past in the annual Oak Bay Tea Party Parade. The parade is led by a man dressed as the Mad Hatter. This Tea Party celebrates a favoured beverage, not a political tendency.

The local MLA, Ida Chong, has paraded in an open convertible, helpers distributing candies to the delighted children who line the route.

For 14 years, she has represented a waterfront constituency at the extreme southeastern tip of Vancouver Island. The double-barreled name of Oak Bay-Gordon Head evokes comfort and perhaps even privilege. The 38,415 voters share the riding with two private golf clubs, the city’s most prestigious private schools, and the Royal Victoria Yacht Club. It is also home to two hospitals and the leafy campuses of Camosun College and the University of Victoria.

It has been called “veddy, veddy British,” “a suburban oasis” and a “conservative, upper-crust area.”

What does geography professor Larry McCann, born 65 years ago in Oak Bay and now a resident of the riding’s Cordova Bay neighborhood, think of the Tweed Curtain designation?

“Inappropriate,” he said. “Long gone. Just doesn’t apply because of relatively strong immigration. The ethnic mix has changed.”

At first glance, the riding does not seem promising ground in which to plant a political insurgency.

As is familiar to letter carriers and newspaper deliverers, simply canvassing some of the wealthy neighbourhoods — such as Ten Mile Point, or the the Uplands, designed by the son of the man responsible for plotting New York’s Central Park — can be daunting, as mansions sit on lots as large as 0.8 hectares.

Yet, the corporation of the district of Oak Bay also offers modest bungalows in a section just across the Tweed Curtain known as The Poets, where the streets are named Byron, Milton and Chaucer.

The riding’s Gordon Head section, which is part of the district of Saanich, is the more populous part of the riding. It is more suburban in design and also more ethnic, including a notable population of Chinese-Canadians and Indo-Canadians.

A snapshot of the riding provided by BC Stats shows an older, better educated, and wealthier population than the provincial average. One voter in five is a senior, while the average household income in 2005 of $90,526 was substantially more than the provincial average of $67,675.

Many of the residents have a professional background, as the riding is home to civil servants from all three levels of government, as well as clerks and educators.

Mr. McCann notes an influx of young families has made the riding more diverse, while a transient student population offers a group of voters perhaps more concerned with issues of social justice.

Elizabeth Cull, a small-business owner who represented the riding for the NDP for seven years before losing to Ms. Chong in 1996, describes the voters as active and informed, especially about public policy issues.

“I found you could spend an awful lot of time on the doorsteps talking to people about what was happening in the province,” Ms. Cull said.

“This is a well-educated electorate and they like to talk about the issues.”

The riding has a history of independence, often bucking the governing party. Dr. Scott Wallace won the seat for the Conservatives in 1969, held it against an NDP landslide and retained the seat after a revamped Social Credit party swept to power in 1975.

“They are independent minded,” Ms. Cull said. “They voted for Scott Wallace for years, because Scott was a person of integrity who represented them well.”

Ms. Cull lives in South Oak Bay, where “people know their neighbours. It’s friendly. It’s livable. There’s a sense of safety and security.”

The former B.C. finance minister is now proprietor of the local Dig This chain of gardening stores. One outlet can be found at the intersection of Oak Bay Avenue and Foul Bay Road, the very entrance to the Tweed Curtain.