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A platform to build on

Andrew Robertson apologized last week in the back of the Question. Missed it? Me too; I don’t usually make it all the way to the classifieds. Sorry, I’ll try to do better.
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Andrew Robertson apologized last week in the back of the Question. Missed it? Me too; I don’t usually make it all the way to the classifieds. Sorry, I’ll try to do better.

Andy, if you don’t know, is the flaming arsehole who, anxious and depressed, perhaps because he didn’t get the chance to kill anything in Pemberton, whipped out a sawed-off shotgun and did battle, mano-a-.12 gauge with a puny year-old bear cub on the doorstep of Whistler Secondary last spring. Andy apparently figured his 24-year-old life would be a whole lot better and his day not entirely uneventful if he wasted some other living creature, any creature. Perhaps the thrill of playing Halo had worn off.

Provincial Court judge, Douglas Moss, a man who will never earn the moniker Hangin’ Judge, let the miscreant plead guilty to a couple of counts under the Wildlife Act, banned him from hunting — hunting? — or possessing firearms for three years, fined him a couple of thousand bucks and ordered him to write a letter of apology and have it published in one or both of the local papers at his own expense. I can only hope Steph charged him about $100,000 for the ad. At least it’s nice no one corrected his spelling.

His apology is as lame as his cowardly action was inexcusable. Since he made no statement in court and didn’t bother to address it in his apology, we’ll never know what, if anything, was rattling around in his apparently empty head when he decided shooting a tiny bear in an urban setting seemed like a good idea. I guess we’re lucky it was just a bear.

Coupled with the municipal election race, this incident got me thinking about my own election platform. Oh, I know, I forgot to register as a candidate again. So what? Doesn’t mean I don’t have a platform; just means I don’t have a campaign.

I’d build my platform on my own solution to Whistler’s problem bear problem. For starters, I’d like to ban the use of the damning epithet, “problem bear.” I’d like to politically correct it, make it as socially unconscionable as referring to Native Canadian First Nations Aboriginal Peoples as “savages.” It’s “our home and Native land,” Dick, not home and savage land. Jeesh, what kind of drugs were you taking?

Problem bears would, henceforth, be called forage-challenged bears, garbage-eating bears or, simply, hungry bears. And we’d stop shooting them. First, we’d tackle the problem at its source — the people feeding forage-challenged bears. While it’s nice we’re going to start assessing larger fines against people who feed garbage-eating bears, I’d like to go one step further. Let the Conservation Officers, or Bylaw for that matter, trank the folks who just can’t seem to get their garbage where it belongs and relocate them. Imagine their surprise waking up dazed and naked in the middle of, say, Surrey. Repeat offenders might find themselves coming to in the bush outside Bralorne, wrapped tightly in a cloak of Snickers bars, sort of a eat-or-be-eaten brave new world.

But what to do about the bears? Relocating them doesn’t work very well. Bear aversion tactics don’t work very well once they’ve developed a taste for human food. Shooting them is, well, even more ridiculous than capital punishment. At least humans being executed have done something heinous. Hard to rationalize shooting bears for becoming garbage junkies when we’re, collectively, the pushers.

I think we have to step up and take responsibility for our actions. We made ’em what they’ve become, we should take care of them. We need to domesticate forage-challenged bears. Finish their socialization into human society, complete what we started.

Stay with me on this idea, it has a lot of benefits. Having a herd of domesticated bears offers a number of advantages. For starters, it would take care of a lot of garbage we’d otherwise have to pay to truck down to Washington or the new composter, saving on both fuel and expense, a truly green alternative. As a tourist attraction, a bear petting zoo would be a huge draw. Some of the more docile bears could even give bearback rides to delighted children while doting parents take priceless videos to show the folks back home.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m betting we could completely turn around the rather tawdry image of bear wrestling. What drunken tourist wouldn’t jump at the chance to climb into the ring at the Longhorn and wrestle a bear? Since the bears would be domesticated, we’d make sure they have a nice manicure to keep their claws from doing more damage than just raising welts — very attractive to the opposite sex, guys — and a little ursine dental work would improve their smile and neuter their bite. After all, you don’t need really big teeth to eat garbage.

Now, I’m sure PETA — People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, not that other group, People Eating Tasty Animals — would bitch and moan about bear wrestling in Whistler. But really, isn’t a cushy life of domestic bliss a more ethical alternative than killing garbage-bears? Of course it is.

The bear plank of my platform isn’t all I have to offer. The Muni’s just embarked on its 10 th Annual Sewer Challenge, a plea to the Building Canada Fund for a grant to cover some of the cost of installing a sewer line along Alta Lake Road. The 39 homes on the west side of Alta Lake live in turd-world conditions, with about 60 per cent of their septic systems feeding nutrients (ugh) into Alta Lake. Senior levels of government have repeatedly denied grant assistance.

I say it’s time to get some help. I say it’s time to enlist the services of Mr. Floatie. Mr. Floatie, for those of you who don’t know him, is the walking, talking, six-foot turd who finally shamed the city of Victoria into treating its sewage. Maybe during the next IOC visit or the next time Rear-Entry Campbell comes to town, we should get Mr. Floatie to dog their footsteps carrying a sign that says, “Whistler Stinks! Support the West Side Sewer!” Sometimes it takes a shamin’ to get politicians to do the right thing.

I’ve got other ideas. You knew I would. But my two minutes are up. You’ll have to wait for me to tell you about the artistic merits of having five snowboarders straight-line Shale Slope with broad, Christo-like sheaths of brightly coloured fabric streaming behind them, being unrolled from their anchors atop the pitch while powder junkies lined up for the Peak chair applaud in raucous approval. Go arts; go culture!