This letter was submitted to PrinceGeorgeMatters from Stuart Parker.
Ever since Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry’s apocryphal 2001 claim that “crosses are being burned on [Prince George] lawns as we speak,” my new home, the City of Prince George, has struggled with its image in southwestern B.C. as a hotbed of racism.
Most sensible people in Prince George believe that, like all Canadian communities, there is plenty of racism here, just as there is in the province’s urban southwest.
But, for the past generation, there has been considerable debate about whether the average resident is more racially prejudiced than the average Victorian or Vancouverite.
And when those of us who do anti-racist organizing confront such claims, we are conflicted: should we show how many of us are working to end racial prejudice here at the risk of minimizing the very large and real problems of racism in our city or should we risk validating unhelpful and false clichés about our relative backwardness compared to a supposedly more tolerant urban southwest?
As a newcomer to Prince George, it has been my experience so far that my new city is no more racist than my last two, Vancouver and Surrey and is, in some ways less so.
What I can say is that when one encounters racism in Prince George, it tends to be presented in a less sophisticated, less careful way than in many bigger cities.
But, this also means that it is often more easily identified and confronted than in the smug “progressive” discourse of bigger centres.
But that is not what has come through to most British Columbians in the past four months.
On Nov. 14, 2019, I had the misfortune to be working as a volunteer sound engineer at CFIS, the community radio station that had graciously given me a show of my own in August as a way of expressing my gratitude.
I was working the boards for Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout when he brought two guests onto his show.
These individuals owned businesses downtown and had become unhappy with the representation they were receiving from the Chamber of Commerce and Business Improvement Association.
Jason Luke and Melanie Desjardins were so annoyed that they had decided to form their own business group to advocate for more extreme solutions to problems associated with the opioid epidemic and homelessness.
Luke and Desjardins explained that “the human rights have gone too far;” the street homeless “don’t have any rights;” in fact, they should be “rounded-up” and placed outside the city.
A racial component was articulated with the business owners talking on- and off-air about the undesirables having come “straight off the reserve.”
I took exception to this view, first on Facebook, then on my blog, then through this paper and finally in a CBC Radio interview.
The views of these business owners were shocking and ended up making news around B.C.
What was missing in that coverage was the fact that not only did the two groups that represented downtown businesses repudiate Desjardins’ and Luke’s views, so did the new business owner group they founded, which elected not to have them as spokespeople.
They were covered as though they represented downtown business even though they were a minority within a minority, the fringe of a fringe.
Why was that? The answer is that the editor of the Citizen, our community’s paper of record, chose to platform them on his show and in his paper and ran a radio editorial in support of their views following the interview.
What was abnormal about Prince George’s urban crisis, compared to other cities, was not the opinion among business owners but an exceptional choice by the city’s main paper and community radio station: to offer a platform to views not normally conferred a platform.
That is because, since the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, and long before the re-emergence of fascism in the past decade, the mainstream media of Western Europe and North America have had a policy of not giving a platform to any of the three interlocking views comprising fascism.
These are, in short: (1) the belief that society is organized into “races” and that people are born into these races and are, by virtue of birth, legitimately subject to discrimination and hatred, (2) the belief that the state does not have a monopoly on violence but that it shares an oligopoly on violence with political parties and civic organizations led by respectable men, (3) that it is appropriate to use violence to detain, imprison or enslave political dissidents and inferior races.
The reason for this is simple, something that Karl Popper identified as the Tolerance Paradox: there must be limits on what views are given legitimacy in the public square of a free and tolerant society in order that the freedom and tolerance not to be swallowed-up by intolerant movements that do not respect these values.
While we cannot and should not limit people’s freedom of speech, our community’s leaders should not offer the views comprising fascism the legitimacy or amplification that favoured treatment in mainstream broadcast and print media does.
But for some reason, not only are those views covered by the city’s newspaper of record and main community radio station; that coverage policy is viewed as sacrosanct and above criticism.
Beginning in November, I began facing pressure from the management of CFIS not to express any criticism of the Citizen editor’s bizarre and exceptional policy of platforming fascism in any forum, including my own personal Facebook page and blog.
But when our community’s newspaper of record chose to prominently print the now-infamous “I am a Racist” letter to the editor, I felt duty-bound to express my criticism as one member of the local media to the most senior members in our community.
Although I did not express this criticism on air but only on my personal Facebook page, I faced down a series of threats, ultimatums and an attempted shouting match to secure my promise that I would never criticize this policy, despite the harm it was doing to Prince George’s public square and provincial reputation.
Even as the letter was raised in the legislature by the Minister of Citizens Services and condemned by our local BC Liberal MLA Shirley Bond, pressure intensified for me to promise never to criticize the policy of platforming fascism.
In the minds of CFIS management, it is not just okay, but a public good to give a platform to declarations of racism as a legitimate political position but it is not okay to give a platform to criticism of this policy of platforming avowed racists.
They believe that criticizing newspaper editorial policies undermines what they counterintuitively term “freedom of speech.”
So, after a series of confrontations, online and in person, I resigned from CFIS moments before my almost certain forcible removal from the broadcast line-up.
I believe that Prince George’s reputation as a hotbed of racism is unfair but also is not unearned.
That is because its media establishment has ideas about platforming views corrosive to civil society that are eighty years out of date, views that it cannot tolerate being discussed or debated.
Even if one agrees with the, let us politely say, “retro” editorial policies of our oldest newspaper, these views should still be debatable, should still have to be explained and defended in the public square, not simply forced upon the population through surveillance and threats.
Every paper in this country receives letters to the editor from racists proclaiming the gospel of racial purity.
Every business community in this country has aspiring segregationists and Brown Shirts.
The difference is that, in other cities, there is a media consensus to mute those voices, not to amplify them.
Prince George does have a unique problem with racism, but it is not that our populace is less tolerant or more bigoted.
It is a problem that exists at an elite level in the leadership of our community’s news media.
And the only way we will solve it is by us, the more junior members of our city’s Fourth Estate, conducting a debate with our putative leadership and hashing out, in the public square, whether we really want to be an outlier, a throwback, a relic in Canadian journalism.
I invite the management of CFIS and the Citizen to join this debate by writing a response.
