You can take the boy out of Squamish, but you can’t take Squamish out of the boy.
I left town five years ago this summer, but I keep close tabs on my old stomping grounds – The Squamish Chief is on my daily reading list online, I get daily Squamish news alerts from Google, I’m a regular lurker on Facebook Squamish Speaks (classic and 2015) I even keep a #squamish list on Twitter.
It comes as no surprise, then, that I’m following the ongoing debate over the Woodfibre LNG proposal. But it’s not just personal curiosity – it’s professional.
My job with Glacier Media, the parent company of the Squamish Chief, is to work with all of our newsrooms, to help improve our content and engage with you, the reader. I get to travel to communities across Western Canada and work with a wide variety of newspapers large and small.
What I’ve noticed in my travels is just how some stories repeat themselves – different names and places, but similar themes and similar arguments.
Case in point: For the last several years, my new hometown of Kamloops has been wrestling with a very contentious proposal to redevelop a large copper mine, situated on the site of a former mine on the outskirts of the city. A sizeable portion of the community has spoken out very vocally against the project, saying it’s simply too close to the community to operate safely and will have detrimental impacts on nearby residents.
Another group is firmly in favour, claiming the risks can be safely managed and the economic benefits are too good to pass up, while a large portion of the population is undecided – or at least undeclared. This allows both sides to claim the support of the “silent majority” in what is becoming an increasingly acrimonious debate.
If you took the words “Kamloops” and “copper mine” and replaced them with “Squamish” and “LNG plant”, I think you’ll find the preceding two paragraphs still hold together quite well.
And it’s not just Kamloops and Squamish that have this in common. In Prince George, the Northern Gateway Pipeline arouses a similar debate. In the Peace Country, it’s the Site C Dam project. In Nanaimo, its’ the Colliery Dams.
Contentious issues are nothing new – Squamish has had its share in the past, as have those other places. But the tone and tenor of debate are changing, and not for the better.
Why? With the rise of the Internet and social media in particular, we have the ability to gather more information than ever before and to connect instantly with people we might never otherwise know. Theoretically we could use this power to inform ourselves, to learn from others and to have better, more reasoned debate.
In reality, we tend to use it to find information that reinforces what we already believe and find others who think the same way, which can create the impression that we have the only valid viewpoint and those who oppose us are either ignorant, blinkered or malicious. Add the ability to instantly respond to opponents online and it’s no wonder the comments on Facebook (and here) get so ugly so quickly.
Neither the Woodfibre debate nor the problems of civil debate in a social media universe can be solved quickly – certainly not in a newspaper column. What I can do, in these few words, is highlight the issue – and suggest that the next time you’re tempted to make that incendiary comment, give it one more moment’s thought before you hit send.
Who knows? It might just help you make your point.
