Don’t let your misgivings about a politician justify unfair treatment in the news media.
Last week, our local CBC outfit took a run at Mayor Simon Yu.
It was a rare investigative piece that highlighted a lot of missed opportunities.
Why not a story on Coun. Cori Ramsay who spent $1,539 of our money on hotels plus an unknown amount on airfare this past June in Ottawa for the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference?
I’m sure there’s an argument this was for city business and not just something she would put to work enhancing her personal brand and re-election campaign material. But it’s hard to see.
Or what about the city winning the nation’s code of silence award? Is the systemic corruption of our cherished institutions and bureaucracies something the CBC, as a rule, doesn’t cover, for fear of besmirching the credibility of their fellow public sector employees?
Instead, they suddenly targeted our inexperienced, vulnerable, and politically isolated mayor.
It was a good yarn. I applauded the reporting at first, shocked Yu would stay at a $759 hotel room. A luxury suite.
This number obviously drove the story.
Charging “$759 to stay overnight at Ottawa's Château Laurier is certainly a choice,” quipped CBC reporter Justin McElroy to his large audience.
But that $759 was for two nights, not one, a key detail that would have undermined the narrative. (The CBC has since quietly corrected its story).
So really he stayed at a $380 hotel, when the Canadian Senate invited Yu, a Chinese-Canadian, to a solemn and symbolic Ottawa commemoration of the shameful time in our history when we discriminated against Chinese immigrants.
If Ramsay’s Ottawa junkets aren’t stories, neither is this one.
As for the rest of Yu’s expenses, they should be lower, but according to the CBC’s own chart, he spent around $2,500 more than the $20,000 the mayors of Kelowna and Nanaimo spent last year.
Is that $2,500 difference, ignoring the $4,000 he saved not renovating his office, a good enough reason for a national scandal? And if so, why wasn’t the $30,000 the Mayor of Nanaimo spent in 2018 a national headline?
I’m not saying we don’t criticize these expenses. I’m saying the CBC’s focus makes no sense.
Yu’s $242 stay at the Treasure Cove Casino is also a bit overstated. Sure, he could have went home for the night, but minus the cost of the cab ride home and back for his morning meeting, that mistake cost us probably $160.
That’s not much meat for a political feeding frenzy, either. And if the story is a dud to begin with, you can’t really go after how he screwed up his response.
The reality of the situation is voters propelled an unwelcome outsider into the heart of City Hall, a broken, secretive institution that longs for a return to the halcyon days of Lyn Hall when administration and council held hands in a functional but frivolous union of incompetence and waste.
Remember those days?
Probably not if the CBC was your source of news. They barely covered it.
Whether or not Mayor Yu is worthy of re-election remains to be seen.
The question right now is whether our local CBC is aware of the deepening institutional rot in our society, or if they are simply another part of it, pulling out the knives only when those rotten institutions stand to benefit, and remaining silent when they don’t.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
