The Stranger
It would not be unreasonable for those who read the last chapter, never mind the earlier ones, to wonder how on earth I, of all people, would have been one of the first ten people to sign John Rustad’s nomination papers when he ran for the BC Tory party’s leadership after crossing the floor in 2023. My answer has not changed in the two and a quarter years since I first signed on to the project, except for the verb tense in my explanation: I was very impressed with the Young Turks with whom Rustad surrounded himself. Indeed, I was the first person to coin the phrase “Rustad and his Young Turks,” in the summer of 2023. While not especially original, between the damage done to Anglo American oral tradition by recent sociological developments and the decline in Canadian historical and civics knowledge, the epithet sounded more controversial and innovative than it had any business sounding.
The encounter that connected me with this scene took place in November 2019, just a few months after I had moved there to live full-time with my then girlfriend, when I became the sound man on a community radio show hosted by Nathan Giede, a devout Catholic social conservative activist and newspaper columnist. Today, Nathan runs Rustad’s constituency office in Vanderhoof.
But even before I introduce Nathan, his show and the series of events that made me part of Team Rustad version 1.0, a little more explanation and introduction is warranted, not just of my life situation in the late 2010s but of Prince George, one of the four second-tier regional centres in BC, and the northernmost of these.
Prince George has a great deal of population churn. In the post-neo-feudal order of BC’s boreal forest, it has been one of the very few communities not to shrink, in part because its pulp and sawmills have been the destination for the wood that does require local processing, as local sawmills in smaller cities and towns have closed. The other factor that has allowed it to maintain a population between 70,000 and 80,000 for the past two generations has been the provincial government. The creation of regional “authorities” to administer and deliver provincial social programs has meant a hiring boom for the Commissar Class in BC, by adding a whole additional level of administrative staff in the regional centres. Northern Health is just the highest profile of the regional management team that sits between the provincial Ministry of Health and local hospitals and clinics; similar regional authorities exist in child protection and other social programs.
Regional authorities of the provincial government are not the only thing that has been pouring members of the Laptop Class into the city. More important even than the University of Northern BC, which opened in 1995, and has grown steadily by increasing its admission of foreign students (local enrollment has actually declined in recent years), is the massive increase in the size of the Reconciliation industry, especially since the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015.
Not only has the number of employees and the amount of commercial real estate occupied by First Nations increased, and not just of local Indian bands but of indigenous governments in remote areas of Northern BC, such as the Kwadacha reserve, 600km north of Prince George; so have professions parasitic on the reconciliation industry, the negotiators, the grant writers, the consultants, etc. Even artists and arts administrators are pulled in as the Reconciliation Industry forms new alliances with Canada’s emerging Grief Industry. Even, if we won’t actually enact policies to reduce the number of missing and murdered women on Highway 16, the feds can at least find an increasing amount of funding for us to cry about it.
And then there is the hybridization of the provincial Authorities model and Reconciliation Industry in the form of entities like Carrier-Sekani Family Services and the Aboriginal Health Authority, which create parallel regional indigenous authorities to the “settler-colonial” local authorities, authorities that need a lot of grant writing and consulting done for them. (Full disclosure: I worked two contracts for CSFS.)
With major pipeline development connecting the fracking wells of BC’s northeast with the state-funded Big Oil export terminals of the northwest, Prince George has managed to somehow retain a frontier town spirit even as the forestry sector employment on which the town was built has continued its collapse. And it has done so entirely with investment from outside not within.
Prince George has experienced high levels of population churn for about forty years now, despite its actual numbers actually staying the same. It is a town characterized by a boom-and-bust economic cycle that has permeated the psychosocial nature of its longer-term residents. It is also a city surrounded by resource-rich territory and great natural beauty while possessing neither of these things in its immediate vicinity. Its major natural gifts come in the form of being situated at the confluence of the most important rivers, railways and roads in the province. People who stay in hotels in Prince George have come for a conference, a trade show, an international flight or the next leg of the road trip they are on, not to see Prince George.
Between its long-term bush worker culture, its location, the hardscrabble lives of many of its residents and 15% indigenous population, the city has developed a kind of permanent frontier culture, which combined with its role as investee rather than investor, has caused it to resemble, at a socio-cultural level an Old West frontier town. Even the town mascot Mister P. G. evokes this, a sculpture made entirely of repurposed used septic tanks at the junction of Highway 97 and Highway 16.
Maybe that is why it is looking for The Stranger to come and solve its problems.
