To some, they are heroes — knights battling against an unjust, ill-conceived status quo. To others, they are whiners, extremists, fanatics, bleeding hearts, redneck hillbillies, religious freaks, granola nut-crunchers, wackos, dogmatic doorknobs, liberal pussy willows or conservative nincompoops. Activists open themselves up to these kinds of labels. But to still others they are just regular people acting on their Canadian right to freedom of expression. We have all perceived people who seem to believe the world revolves around them in some way — that their ideals are too important not to be heard, over and over and over. We may even think a few of them just like to hear their own voice or “get published” in the letters-to-the-editor section of their community newspapers. Whatever the reason, whatever the cause, they are sure to make someone angry — even if they are later proven right. After all, Galileo was placed under house arrest by the Roman Inquisition for his correct assertions that the earth revolves around the sun.
But this feature is not meant to be about issues or causes. Instead, it focuses on a few people who have the spirit and gumption to act in carrying out their right of free speech. Why do they do it? Who are they really? The Valley residents we’ve chosen to profile stand out for their public commitment to the causes they champion, but also for the serious ire they raise in those who disagree with them. It is our hope that these human interest stories, bold and daring as they might be, will help facilitate understanding and contribute to a more humane dialogue on all sides.
Contributions by Ross Freake, Shelley Wood and Dona Sturmanis
The Impossible Dream?
John Zeger is on a personal mission to save Kelowna’s paradise from unbridled growth. But opponents call him an extremist for his uncommon views and assertive posturing — they’d like to see new high-density developments and a more vibrant, safer downtown core
By Ross Freake
John Zeger and I have never met. I don’t even know what he looks like, but when he walks into Kelowna’s Kasugai Gardens, gravel crunching under his running shoes, I know he is the guy whose brain I am going to pick. His booming voice, incongruous in a small frame, announces he recognizes me as well.
He apologizes for being late as he hitches up his denim shorts and folds himself into a cross-legged position in the sunlight while I sit in the shadows — fitting somehow for the roles we are to play.
His clothes tell the story of the man. His ball cap, from a meditation centre in California, whispers his spirituality while his faded, green T-shirt, with the words Citizens for Responsible Community Planning, proclaims his political activism.
He’s late because he had to move his scooter. He says he chose the gardens because it’s calm and tranquil. The gardens, tucked away behind city hall, with washrooms that are handy for people who read and drink tea copiously, was one of the things that drew him from the sterility of Edmonton to the greenness of Kelowna and feeds his hunger for nature. It’s also a good place for this interviewer to empty his head before getting into Zeger’s.
A Warrior Emerges
Like many people seduced by beauty of place, Zeger saw Kelowna as a paradise, but he’s worried Eden is threatened. To protect it, he has an impossible dream that would inspire even Don Quixote. While the Spanish knight tilted at windmills, the Kelowna man is fighting bigger dragons — high rises and what he sees as unchecked growth.
And like Don Quixote, Zeger has his detractors. Some think the activist for controlled growth is a zealot, but he sees himself as a champion, defending Kelowna’s beauty before it’s defiled further by rampant expansion.
He still recalls, with a sense of wonder, the first time he visited the city in 1975. “At the end of the holiday, I didn’t want to go back to Edmonton. I was so in love with this place; it was beautiful. Edmonton didn’t have a sense of community, although I didn’t know whether Kelowna did, but I was hoping.
“I was unaware of what Kelowna’s sense of community was until the (2003) fire. I was really moved by the way this city pulled together to help the victims. I thought, ‘My God. I’ve found it, this is paradise.’ But the sense of community didn’t last. But I thought if the city were planned properly, we would have that sense of community all the time and not just during emergencies.”
When the retired securities trader and urban planner moved here on June 1, 2003, he was shocked to learn the city had rescinded its four-storey height restriction. “That wasn’t the direction a beautiful city, surrounded by mountains, fronting on a lake, should be going.”
He considered writing a letter to the editor but reminded himself he had moved here to retire, not to get involved in politics. He overcame his trepidation when he read the chapter on Spiritual Warriorhood in One River, Many Wells, by Matthew Fox: “A warrior defends what is beautiful; a warrior defends Creation and its light; a warrior defends what the community cherishes; a warrior assists the community to survive.”
He sent the letter to the Kelowna Capital News and wrote another three weeks later. “That’s how it all began; not the desire to shut the doors to newcomers behind me. I took the words of the (Fox) book seriously and I wanted to defend that beauty and defend that community I saw during the Okanagan Mountain Park fire.
“In that sense, I consider myself a warrior, as defending all these things is important to me. The source of my activism is my spiritual belief that we are all one with everyone else and our environment.”
Citizenship, Assassination and Fresh Beginnings
He developed that affinity with nature playing among the orchards and fields of a large estate owned by Catholic nuns. The self-described loner moved with his parents from Linz, Austria, when he was five to rural New Jersey where his father was a gardener on the convent estate. Zeger inherited his father’s love of the soil and still gardens today.
“It was a beautiful place to grow up, but I didn’t have any other kids to grow up with. I had a lot of time to myself, me and Brownie, a collie owned by the nuns.”
After that first idyllic summer, he was sent to a Catholic boarding school on Staten Island. “I remember putting up quite a fuss; crying, screaming and kicking the nuns. I must have sworn at them because I remember them writing some of my language on a piece of paper and making me eat it. I still hold that against the Catholic Church.”
He couldn’t speak English when he went to school, but when he came home at Christmas, he had forgotten his German, the only language his parents spoke.
In spite of the language difficulty, he excelled at the parochial school and the public school he moved to on Long Island when he was in Grade 3. He narrowly missed being the valedictorian at Commack High School and was on the dean’s list while studying political science at the University of Virginia and later at the State University of New York.
“I loved politics and found it very exciting. I ran for president of the high-school student council and lost to the head cheerleader,” he said with a whooping laugh. “I guess I wasn’t as popular as she was. Me and my best friend, Jerry Frietag, ran a mini-party, but he also lost to a girl that was part of the cheerleader slate.”
In his last year of university, he joined the Young Democrats on Campus, but when it supported Eugene McCarthy as the presidential nominee, he joined a splinter group backing Bobby Kennedy.
“I ended up working on Robert Kennedy’s campaign and was part of his support group at the time he was assassinated. It was a real blow.”
Zeger’s voice cracks and his eyes glisten as he presses his hand against his heart, remembering 1968 and the moment that changed his life and his citizenship. “I was stunned. I’m surprised at the emotional impact it has on me so many years afterward. He really inspired me. He had a lot of political courage. He stood up to (Teamsters’ president) Jimmy Hoffa and spearheaded President John Kennedy’s civil rights legislation.
“(The shooting of Robert Kennedy) was right after the assassination of Martin Luther King. There were race riots. I thought the country was splitting at the seams. I was disenchanted with what was going on and decided to do my graduate work in Canada.”
His economics professor knew the chairman of the political science department at the University of Regina. “She said ‘write the guy.’”
Zeger did and was offered a job as a teaching assistant. When he threw his possessions into his ’67 Camaro, he knew he was leaving his life, family and country behind. “It was my intention to stay, to give something back for the opportunity Canada gave me. At the time I was driving to Regina, there was a demonstration cum riot at the Democratic national convention in Chicago. I was watching it on a TV in my hotel in Northern Ontario and I thought, ‘boy, am I glad I’m here and not there. What is going on with that society?’”
He immediately fell in love with the city named for a queen and its sense of community. He loved the differences he saw between Canadians and Americans, as did his girlfriend when she came to visit. While taking her to Saskatoon when it was -35 Celsius, his car broke down. “My first thought was ‘oh, my God, we’re going to freeze to death,’ because in New York in a situation like that, no one would stop. The first car stopped and offered assistance. The people in Regina were fantastic; the sense of community kept me there; everybody helped everybody.”
Zeger would have stayed, but the job was for two years, so, he and new wife, whom he had met in Regina, moved to Edmonton where they attended the University of Alberta. But the life of a student lost its lustre. “We were getting tired of living off wieners and beans, so I went and got a job — as a social worker.” For six months.
“There was an ad to do research at the Edmonton Regional Planning Commission (ERPC). Someone with a social science background who knew how to do good social research. I thought, ‘hey, that’s me.’ And it paid better than social work.”
But having money to buy filet mignon couldn’t heal the growing split in their marriage and after seven years they divorced, acrimoniously. They didn’t stay in touch.
ERPC was the planning authority for the areas around Edmonton, but over time, the communities got their own planning departments and after 11 years, he was laid off. Fortunately, Zeger had been more of a saver than a spender and with the generous severance package, he had time to think about his future.
After going back to university to study economics for a year, he turned a high-school fantasy into a job. “I had a keen interest in investing and the stock market, but never had the nerve to quit my job, but all of a sudden, it was sink or swim. I’m proud to say I swam.
“One of the reasons I left Edmonton was because all my friends seemed to be these stock-market-gambling personalities and I was bored with it. It was of no consequence to what mattered in life and I wanted to get into something I liked better, like the spiritual aspect.”
While in Regina, Zeger had become interested in eastern philosophy, especially as interpreted by Alan Watts whose The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are “grabbed me on a gut level; it’s just so real and so true.” He started meditating and still goes to the Self-Realization Fellowship centre in Encinitas, California, every year. He also leads an interfaith meditation group in Kelowna. “I like to share what I’ve learned, not in a dogmatic sense, but in a sharing sort of sense.”
Days of Infamy
That sense of sharing brought Zeger out to protest the Pandosy-Richter one-way couplet with the No One Way Committee when he first moved to Kelowna. He later made presentations to council on the projections of city growth and joined the Friends of the Library where Steve Kabella told him he should meet Bob Cichocki, a retired mill worker, inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer and environmentalist.
“We hit it off like that,” Zeger said, holding up crossed fingers. “When he spoke, it was like listening to myself. And vice versa. I thought why not enlarge this group and give it a name and a purpose. I decided to start a group called Citizens for Responsible Community Planning (CRCP), concerned exclusively with opposing what was originally Phil Milroy’s Lawson’s Landing proposal for the redevelopment of a four-block area of the downtown.”
“There were about a half dozen of us — me, Bob, Steve and Kevin Ade, and a few others (now there are about 30 in the group). I became the spear-carrier who championed the fight against the Lawson’s Landing proposal. That’s where I began to get my infamy.”
Zeger also formed Citizens for a Livable Downtown, which has 100 people on its mailing list, to examine planning and make representations to bodies such as the advisory planning commission and city council promoting CRCP’s principles.
He wrote an anti-development letter to The Daily Courier and said he received an email from then-editor John Harding saying, “‘John, I’ll gladly print your letter, but if I do, I’m going to start referring to you as against all development because you haven’t come out in favour of anything.’
“I responded and said ‘John, I’m doing this out of principle. You can write what you like, but I’m against the McKinley Landing project and you can print my letter.’ He did and kept his word and started taking shots at me in his editorials. But I think it was a bit unfair. I admit I wasn’t very enthusiastic about most development since most of what was being created was luxury housing. I was an advocate of affordable housing and there wasn’t much being created, so there wasn’t much for me to be enthusiastic about.”
In 2005, realizing that letter writing, protesting and circulating petitions wasn’t enough, Zeger ran for city council. “If I didn’t stand up for what I believed in, no one would have and somebody should have run on that kind of platform. I thought I’m not going be very effective if I run by myself, so I tried to organize a slate.”
Only Andy Thomsen, a retired pilot, and Rick Shea, an Okanagan College instructor, joined the Action for a Sustainable Kelowna slate. In the election, Zeger was 23rd out of 31 candidates and received 2,267 votes. Shea got 2,157 votes and Thomsen 1,865. (Carol Gran, the final and eighth candidate elected, received 7,169 votes.)
Zeger blames Harding for his poor showing. “The people saw me as John Harding did. That was one of the things I found frustrating, the acceptance of John Harding’s view of me. I ran into a fellow who I knew socially and I asked if he was planning to vote for me and he said no. I asked why. He said, ‘you’re an extremist.’
“I asked him where he got that from — John Harding? And he said yes. I was disappointed that people took John Harding’s word without thinking for themselves. That had a lot to do with the fact I didn’t make a very good showing in ’05.”
Harding doesn’t recall writing the email. “It doesn’t sound like something I would do; it’s just not me. But I’m flattered he thinks I had that much sway over people. I wish him all the best and I won’t be around to blame this time.”
Counterpoint
(The Dragon Stirs)
Unlike Zeger, Duane Tresnich was, and is, enthusiastic about the re-development and re-vitalization plans for the downtown, especially Lawson’s Landing. He was so outraged by the anti-development stance of Zeger and Citizens for Responsible Community Planning that he started Move Kelowna Forward.
“I have worked and or lived in downtown Kelowna for 17 years,” says the Shaw employee. “I’ve seen the problems, the drugs, the homeless people and here was (Lawson’s Landing developer) Phil Milroy giving us a chance to re-develop the downtown core. Here was someone willing to spend money and (Zeger) comes out and says, ‘no you can’t do this.’”
So like Zeger, Tresnich wrote a letter-to-the-editor, but supporting the proposal and asked anyone who agreed with his pro-development view to call him. “I got a whack of responses, so I said let’s form a lobby group because it’s a lot easier to say no and get press than for people to say we’re for it and get it.”
Within a month, he and 10 to 15 people formed Move Kelowna Forward; Tresnich guesses that there are about 300 now in the loose organization, which also has a website, movekelownaforward.com.
Tresnich disagrees that high rises will form a concrete wall, cutting the city off from the lake. “The new designs are taking a step back to early 20th century where everyone lived downtown with stores on the bottom and homes on top.
“I won’t question (Zeger’s) passion but his ideas are way left. His idea of capping population, you can’t stop people from moving here.”
Like Tresnich, Kelowna city manager Ron Mattiussi also wonders if it’s legal to cap population or building permits. “I don’t think it’s the solution; it’s too far down the food chain.”
The former planning director, who came to Kelowna after working at the ERPC, where he briefly encountered Zeger, says if someone buys a legal lot and wants a building permit, council can’t refuse. And even if it could, it would create an operational and administrative nightmare. “Do you say, line up; first 100 people indoors get a building permit? Is that the way you do it?”
Mattiussi also wonders what would happen if Kelowna limited growth. “Wouldn’t that shoot up the price of housing? Wouldn’t that mean they would build on our border? If building on the Westside is uncontrolled, does that help Kelowna?
“Do we have to have more sustainability? Yes. Do we have to manage growth? Yes. Come to grips with urban sprawl? Yes. But I don’t think the solutions are simple; there’s a lot of complex interplay and, in Canada, I believe we have the right to live anywhere.”
A Daring Quest for Change Presses On
Like Don Quixote, Zeger doesn’t let the opinions of others keep him from trying to reach his dream. He’s running in the November municipal election again because he says he has met so many people disappointed that the change promised during the 2005 campaign didn’t materialize. “That’s one of the things I’m emphasizing, let’s have some real change this time.
“Infrastructure is seriously lagging growth. I’m also unhappy in some of the ways this growth is manifesting in the form of high rises and particularly high-rise condos that are being built for the wealthy; this is becoming a city for the rich.
“Regardless of my chances of being elected, I have to run; there has to be somebody to represent this point of view and I think it’s the only point of view that can save the city, save our community character, save our quality of life.”
Name: John Zeger
Age: 61
Hometown: Linz, Austria
Currently lives in: Kelowna
Occupation: Retired securities trader and urban planner
Education: BA, plus extensive post-graduate work
Family: Older sister living in Long Island, N.Y.
Hobbies: Reading, gardening
Influential books: The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts; The Phenomenology of Spirit by G.W.F. Hegel; One River, Many Wells by Matthew Fox; Motivation and Personality by Abraham Maslow; Better Not Bigger by Eben Fodor; Beyond Growth by Herman Daly
Fights for: Controlled growth
Websites:
www.saveparadise.org
www.johnzeger.wordpress.com
Main opposition:
Move Kelowna Forward
www.movekelownaforward.com
more from the other side:
www.imaginekelowna.com
The Ripple Effect
Karen Abramsen perceives problems like injustice, exploitation and the erosion of Canada’s national sovereignty and works to prevent them, hoping to inspire others along the way. But some might say her fears about discreet corporate and government deals border on paranoia or radical idealism
By Shelley Wood
I get the sense there is a jumble of things going on in Karen Abramsen’s head. She’s agreed to meet me at Kelowna’s Bean Scene North and, with good-natured scepticism, answer my questions. But it’s clear she’s multitasking. Someone else is here to meet her too, clutching papers and speaking to her sotto voce.
“If you need me to come and bail you out, just phone,” she calls after her associate when he leaves. Then she checks her horoscope before sitting down with me. “I just need to see if it says I can talk to you,” she jokes.
There is a laid-back affability to Abramsen. She lacks the clamorousness and the brooding solemnity that you might expect to find in the local chair of the Council of Canadians. She’s wearing shorts and a black blouse, partly untucked and festooned with colourful dots; her sandals make a summery slapping sound as she tramps with her iced coffee toward our table. Her wavy hair has the look of someone who regularly rakes her fingers through it when she’s thinking. Something she seems to do a lot.
Two Sides of Life
Abramsen can’t credit a single, defining moment that transformed her from observer to activist, saying she was “always a shit-disturber.”
“I remember raging down to the office at my school—although I don’t remember exactly what it was about — and going in and sticking my neck out when nobody else was willing to do it.”
Born to “right-wing” parents in the conservative enclave of West Vancouver, Abramsen says the tiny suburb where she was raised belied the fact that her parents had no money to spare. “People would say, oh, you’re from West Van, you’re privileged, and that wasn’t true at all. I worked all the way through high school and I paid for everything myself …. My dad had a ’49 Plymouth and I used to pray every day that car wouldn’t start because everyone else had a fancier vehicle and we were driving this old car well into the ’60s.”
Despite growing up on Vancouver’s affluent north shore, she was always aware of what she calls “the divide.”
She recalls heading to Vancouver’s skid row, now the Downtown Eastside, when she was still in high school to eat at the White Lunch cafeteria where fellow diners were using welfare meal-tickets to buy their lunch. “Somehow I had that concept, even then, that there were two worlds that existed in Vancouver — I felt the pull of going over to experience that other side of life,” she says thoughtfully. “I was obviously just an outsider looking at it, but I was very aware that there were two sides of life.”
Her sense of injustice and imbalance in the world was honed by travelling, which is how Abramsen spent her twenties. First to Europe, North Africa, Greece and Turkey, then later, while working as the regional coordinator for Canada World Youth (CWY), to Malaysia. Following her stint at CWY, she worked as a tour operator for adventure travel agencies, taking groups to South America. After interacting with aboriginal people from Guatemala, she says she travelled back “full circle” to wanting to learn more about First Nations peoples in Canada.
Organizer of Many Hats
While she’s talking, Abramsen gestures briskly with her hands, as if they are helping yank thoughts from her head. She stops now and then to rub her eyes aggressively or punctuate a statement with a forceful swilling of ice cubes.
She doesn’t challenge the label “activist,” but she carefully points out that an activist means different things to different people.
“To me an activist is somebody who cares enough to get involved in their community and to speak out when they see injustice and to try to make a change for the better,” she says.
And what does she think of as her community? “For me, it’s whatever happens to be important at any given moment. I was involved with a gravel pit fight in our neighbourhood and I’ve been involved in local Kelowna issues around things like the privatization of the Coquihalla. But community can also mean British Columbia as a whole and issues like the privatization of BC Hydro; or Canada and the fight to save public health care, public services, public energy, public water.”
In the mid-1980s, Kelowna became Abramsen’s community, when she moved here for work. At first, she says, she was appalled by the lack of cultural diversity and worldly curiosity in the local citizenry.
“For a Vancouver girl who had spent a lot of years travelling overseas and being exposed to so many different cultures, I felt I’d come to Death Valley,” she jokes. “When I first arrived, the most exotic thing you could find on a menu was at a restaurant called Bonanza and they’d put Catalina salad dressing on a chicken breast.”
In time, however, she found a network of like-minded people through Tools for Peace, the Canada-wide grassroots movement that evolved in the 1980s to support the Nicaraguan people and the Sandinista movement, and opposed the American economic blockade and military action in that country.
“We had a really strong group here and anyone who had any kind of political activism in them got involved in that,” she says. “Even today, a lot of the activist communities in Kelowna all spawned from Tools for Peace.”
One of her fellow Tools for Peace activists is Eileen Robinson, who remembers meeting Abramsen at an NDP luncheon more than 20 years ago. Robinson describes Abramsen’s passions as “human rights, justice and peace; she’s interested in the environment — it’s all encompassing. She’s concerned about how we live our lives and making sure we do things right.”
Abramsen calls Robinson one of her greatest mentors. Robinson, in turn, calls Abramsen “an organizer.”
“You get a call from Karen, you just snap to attention and do it,” Robinson says simply. “She’s a motivator. We usually don’t argue with her, we just go out and do what she says.”
Robinson also confirms that Abramsen is a multi-tasker, offering me some tidbits about her friend. “Sometimes we get worried about her, because she’s so driven. She’s interested in jazz and blues, she’s a damn good cook and she makes wonderful preserves that we all get a nice jar of at Christmas,” Robinson says. “When you talk to her on the phone you can hear her tapping away on the computer or filing papers. She’s got lots of talents this woman: I swear up and down she’s got a clone in her basement, because I don’t know how she can get so many things done.”
Abramsen was instrumental in starting the Kelowna chapter of the Council of Canadians in the late 1990s and, at a friend’s urging, became chair — a post she has held ever since. She has also been active in the provincial NDP party, but insists that the council draws its strength from being non-partisan, a social voice, without ties to any one political party.
“Many of us have different political stripes within the council — from communist to even having at one point a card-carrying BC liberal on our steering committee when we were fighting the privatization of BC Hydro,” Abramsen explains. “It’s kind of surprising sometimes where you find your allies. The council provides that focus for people to be political, who don’t necessarily want to be associated with a particular political party.”
But Abramsen acknowledges that the Council of Canadians is having mixed success at involving younger activists and she admits she has, at times, despaired about the level of awareness among the younger generation in the Okanagan. But that’s changing, she says.
“Lately there’s been a resurgence of young people in Kelowna who are actually mobilizing amongst themselves. They’re doing their own thing, but we’re forming associations with them. They are in some ways a bit more radical in their approach, but we’re all working together. I’ve been really impressed: over the last few years there’s been a lot more activists coming out of Okanagan College and UBCO than there was a few years ago. I think there’s hope for the future.”
Abramsen is cagey about her day job: after several years working for the federal government, she is now an employment training program administer for an aboriginal organization.
“I like to keep my work life separate from my activism,” she explains. “I’m certainly supportive of the local First Nations issues, but they are the ones who set the stage, they’re the ones who are the political activists in that field …. I would never presume to speak on anyone else’s behalf and in this case I do really try to have other people be the voice for the aboriginal community.”
Spotlight on Backroom Deals
Asked what she thinks is the single biggest issue now facing Canadians, Abramsen names the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), that the federal government describes as “an ongoing dialogue that seeks to address common challenges, strengthen security and enhance the quality of life for the citizens of Canada, the United States and Mexico.”
Abramsen sees it differently. “This is the Canadian government selling off our sovereignty, our common goods and our public services to the Americans in the name of security, post 9-11 and the threat of terrorism. There’s no secret to the fact Americans want our energy and our water and they’ll do whatever they have to do to get it.”
What’s at stake, she says, is Canadian control over public water, public health care and public energy, not to mention the increasingly tight military ties between Canada and the United States.
“We used to be a peacekeeping country and we’re not any more,” she laments. “We’re getting involved in wars and we shouldn’t be.”
A relatively recent focus for Abramsen has been the Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA), an accord signed in 2006 between BC Premier Gordon Campbell and then-premier of Alberta Ralph Kline, without legislative debate or public consultation. The agreement allows corporations or individuals to essentially sue over provincial or municipal government regulations — even those dealing with health or the environment — that somehow restrict their investment/profits, and permits distant bidders to contest locally awarded contracts, even in the municipal, health and education settings.
Kelowna Mayor Sharon Shepherd, who says she’s known Abramsen “for years,” credits her and the Council of Canadians with raising awareness of the issues surrounding TILMA in her municipality.
“Certainly it’s very advantageous to have a community group that is advocating around an issue, especially when you’re working on something with another level of government,” Shepherd says. “It’s helpful to have a community group that is bringing issues forward.”
In Abramsen’s case, says Shepherd, she knows her stuff and she’s savvy about how to get her issues heard.
“I think activists are very important in steering a community in a direction that many people at a grass roots level believe in,” Shepherd says. “But whether they get their cause noted or not depends on how they deal with other people. They have to gain the confidence of those that they’re trying to lobby to get them to recognize that they do have an understanding of the issues and aren’t just lobbying based on an assumption.”
Shepherd says Abramsen does her homework then presents her case in a manner that is courteous, but persuasive.
“I’ve always found Karen to be very respectful, she’s got a very good manner. She does her due diligence around an issue and puts forward a good case for what you should be paying attention to,” Shepherd says. “And at the end of the day, she will respect whatever decision is made based on an understanding that there are hard decisions that have to be made.”
This can be very powerful, says Shepherd. “Karen, certainly with her sense of humour and her easy going manner, is someone that you can have a good conversation with and not feel at all threatened by the discussions. You’re much more willing to listen. She’s not in your face, pounding at your door, but she will be phoning you or emailing you. In some cases people probably don’t even recognize the quiet activism that’s taking place, but that kind of activism can also be very successful.”
Diplomatic — To a Point
My guess is that Abramsen wouldn’t necessarily describe herself as “quiet,” but she admits she’s mellowed over time. “I’m a little more subtle now, a little more diplomatic sometimes,” Abramsen says with a smile. “I haven’t stormed anywhere lately, although I’m not opposed to it. I’d rather make an appointment to see the MLA or MP to discuss something than storm the office, although I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to picketing it either.”
Despite her amiability she’s not without enemies, although she struggles to identify anyone by name. She says she gets some “pretty nasty emails and phone calls,” including one from a city councillor who wouldn’t identify himself.
“I have political adversaries, but we more or less agree to disagree,” she says. “I can’t think of anyone specifically who I’d call an enemy, other than the chickenshit people who phone me and take cheap potshots without identifying themselves.”
There is a water-off-a-duck’s-back optimism to Abramsen. She’s fought for so many causes over the years, she can’t begin to name them. And not all have been successful.
“A lot of people get really bummed because they feel they do so much and it never makes a difference. Those are the naysayers,” Abramsen shrugs. “My philosophy is, it doesn’t really matter, in a way, whether you win or not. Anything you do is going to have a ripple effect and to do nothing is worse than to do something and never know if it’s had an effect. But in the end, I think you do know. I’ve had people over the years come up to me and say, ‘I look up to you.’ I even had a young woman tell me: ‘I want to be like you when I’m grown up.’ And I thought, whoa!”
Sometimes, at the end of a long string of words, Abramsen glances to one side, as if she’s worried she’s perhaps said too much, or hasn’t quite gotten her point across. So she tries again, flashing a grin.
“I don’t try to gauge or measure success, you know? Because if I did, probably I wouldn’t be as involved as I am. I’m just one person doing one little part, but maybe what I do will have an effect on another person who is doing some other part, over there, and eventually those little parts will come together.”
Canada’s Largest Independent Citizens’ Organization
The Council of Canadians is a non-profit volunteer-run government and corporate watchdog, focused on safeguarding Canada’s water, energy, public health care, fair trade policies, and related economic and social concerns of Canadian citizens. Founded in 1985, the organization evolved in response to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney’s trade policies, in particular the dismantling of the Foreign Investment Review Agency and the sale of Canadian businesses to overseas corporations. Over the years, the council has lobbied against the Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and later, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); fought changes to Canada’s pension program; bank mergers; the introduction of bovine growth hormone into Canadian dairy farms; media conglomerates; bulk water exports; and health care system privatization, as well as economic and security integration with the United States.
(Source: www.canadians.org)
Name: Karen Abramsen
Age: 59
Hometown: Vancouver
Currently lives in:
Rose Valley on the Westside (“the real Rose Valley”)
Occupation: Self-employed program administrator working for an aboriginal organization
Education: Student of the world, learning on the job
Hobbies: Politics, gardening, two dogs, two cats. “I live on an acreage, so what does that say? I’ve got ‘projects’”
Influential books:
Anything by Noam Chompsky
Fights for: Justice, Canadian sovereignty
Member of: Council of Canadians (www.canadians.org); BC New Democratic Party (www.bcndp.ca)
Main opposition: “Those chickenshit weasels who don’t have the guts to leave their name on my answering machine or come and say to my face what it is they don’t like”
Little-known fact: Wants to get a tattoo before she dies
The Hottest Button
For Canadians campaigning to outlaw abortion, Marlon Bartram is just another champion for the unborn. But to many who would like women to have a choice, and abortion to remain a safe, legal option, he’s a zealot who wants the government to force his views on others and take control of women’s bodies.
by Ross Freake
When I drive past Kelowna General Hospital (KGH) on a Tuesday, I always check out the pro-lifers protesting what most Canadians, Parliament and the Supreme Court think is a woman’s right. I wonder: are they kooks who think they can change the Canadian mindset and law by the force of their conviction? But I also admire them for their willingness to weather the scorn and indifference of the people who drive by — people like me.
So I have mixed feelings joining the 20 or so picketers — children, parents and grandparents — with sandwich board signs unequivocally stating their position. I don’t wear a sign, journalistic impartiality and all that. Besides, if some wing nut shows up with over-ripe tomatoes or rotten apples, I don’t want to be the target.
Abortions have been performed at KGH on Tuesdays since 2000 and every Tuesday for those eight years, members of the Kelowna Right to Life (KRTL) have left their footprints on that sidewalk in front of the hospital.
Six years ago, Marlon Bartram, the guy I walk with, thought much like the passing drivers. The new executive director of KRTL didn’t give much thought to abortion, whether it was right or wrong, good or evil, a woman’s right to choose or a crime against humanity.
He became a pro-life champion when his girlfriend got pregnant and decided she didn’t want to have the baby.
At first glance, the motorcycle riding, marathon running, Bob Dylan loving 45-year-old Bartram seems an unlikely lightning rod. But like everyone else walking this line, he believes right down to his DNA that life begins at conception and to take that life, whether in a back alley or a hospital ward, is murder.
He prefers logic to emotion and reason to confrontation. “You have to be careful not to be seen as being too emotional. People see you as a radical if you get too emotional about it. But on the other hand, sometimes straight logic isn’t enough to get your point across. Killing a child is inherently emotional, but it has to be backed up by impenetrable logic.”
He learned the power of logic from a math teacher in high school at KLO. “I totally respected the way he coolly, calmly and logically went about things. There was no emotion in his teaching, just the bare facts and calculated logic. I was intrigued by that.”
Divorce Times Two
Bartram was born in Vancouver and grew up in Kelowna, but at 17 he moved to Alberta to live, work and reconnect with his only brother, who is 10 years older. His brother was the second oldest and he was the second youngest of the eight children born to a baker and a stay-at-home mom. It wasn’t a close family and it didn’t get any closer, at least not for Bartram, when his parents divorced while he was a teen. His father died a few years ago, but Bartram lives in the same housing complex as his mother and tries to visit her often.
After a few years in Camrose, Bartram got a job in Edmonton at a popular dine-in restaurant chain. The work ethic he had learned from his father and brick-laying brother paid off and he was soon a shift supervisor. He worked at most of the restaurant’s locations in Edmonton before deciding the Okanagan sun was preferable to Alberta snow.
In Kelowna he went to work for the same company, met a woman, had a child and got married. He had one other child with his wife, but after six years his marriage ended. “Divorce is one of those things that not too much good comes out of it,” Bartram says. “It hurts the parents. It hurts the children. It hurts society. Divorce has societal repercussions, especially for kids. I don’t think they really get over it.”
While he met his financial obligations to his now-grown children, he isn’t as close to them as he would like to be. “It’s pretty sad. She had a live-in boyfriend for a number of years, so he took over that role of the father figure. As long as it was good for the kids, I was OK with it.”
Bartram left one restaurant chain for another, but after six years there he decided it was time for a large change and, at 41, enrolled at Okanagan University College.
Doldrums of What-If
The defining moment of Bartram’s life occurred between an ending and a new beginning. At 8 a.m., on Dec. 31, 2002, a Tuesday, in spite of his arguments, his logic — his emotion, his pleas, his tears — Bartram’s girlfriend went to KGH for an abortion.
The wound is still raw. He looks out his office window as he talks — beyond the trees, beyond the parking lot, beyond Springfield Road and into the past, which is still very present. “I tried everything. I offered to keep the baby and raise it myself. I even spoke to a lawyer to see if there were any legal avenues I could take. But men have absolutely no right to choose in that situation.
“Before this happened, I would have described myself as pro-choice. I thought it was a woman’s issue. But then she was pregnant and I started looking at both sides. I read articles by pro-lifers and pro-choicers. I have a problem with that term — pro-choicers — because they certainly don’t want the men to have a choice and definitely the baby doesn’t get a choice. Their position is more accurately described as advocates of legal abortion.”
After his girlfriend left that morning, he stayed in bed hoping and praying she would change her mind. She phoned about 11. “She said, ‘I’m going to go for lunch and I’ll be home in a few hours.’ If I hadn’t asked the question ‘did you go through with it?’ she wouldn’t have brought it up; already she had blocked it out.
“All she said was ‘yep, it’s done,’” Bartram says, voice small and quavering, eyes in the shadow of his hands. “When she said that, I felt my heart break.”
He stares out the window. During the long silence, he rubs his eyes, swallows, gets up and leaves the room. He returns with a glass of water, eyes red rimmed.
“I didn’t get out of bed for three days; I had no interest in eating or drinking; there was uncontrollable weeping; all the symptoms of grieving for a loved one; a lost child. I did go to counselling and post-abortive treatment. That helped a lot, but the fact remains I should have a five-year-old child getting ready to go to school in September. Every day, I think about what that child would look like now, the sound of his voice, what it would feel like to hug and kiss him good night.”
His voice breaks again; his body shakes in grief and pain.
“I don’t know what the sex of my unborn child was. Nonetheless, I believe he was a boy and named him Jacob. For post-abortive men and women, honouring the life and dignity of the lost child is an important component in the healing process. Naming the child is certainly one way to do that.
“I think of how many lost lives there are because of abortion; it’s terrible how many parents are missing their children.”
According to Statistics Canada, in 2005, the last year for official figures, there were almost 100,000 abortions in Canada, and 15,000 in BC, but some people think the number is higher.
In a story in the Globe and Mail, Debby Copes, who has been performing abortions for almost 20 years, says statistics are meaningless unless they take into account the full extent of abortion services in Canada. “I can think of at least 10,000 procedures that are happening every year in Toronto that aren’t being counted,” she says, referring to abortions being done in doctors’ offices or clinics that are not licensed.
Pain Awakens a Contentious Purpose
Bartram’s relationship with his girlfriend didn’t survive the abortion and his grief, which he says she didn’t understand. “But after a couple of months, I think she started feeling it as well, started realizing ‘what have I done, I actually had my own unborn child killed.’ My heart goes out to all those women suffering from it.”
He decided to pursue a degree in social work “to learn more about humanity and to see how I could make a difference. That experience basically forced me to dedicate the rest of my life to pro-life work, that’s my purpose. When you come face to face with an injustice, it’s our responsibility to speak out about it. You can’t just stay silent when small babies are being killed.
“I do pro-life work, not because I want to, but because I’m deeply compelled to. It’s not pleasant when you’re at a demonstration and people are hurling insults at you, giving you the finger, telling you to get a life, accusing you of being anti-women. That’s not something I want to go through, but social reformers throughout history have met resistance and people have been thrown in jail for standing up to injustices, even killed.”
While at university Bartram started Students For Life and fought to get it club status, which conferred some privileges and a few dollars. But in 2006, the club’s status was rescinded by the UBCO students’ union, which prompted a complaint to the BC Human Rights Tribunal. Earlier this year, the complaint was rejected. Leadership for the UBCO students’ union could not be reached for comment.
After graduating from UBCO this spring, he was hired on a one-year contract as the first paid executive director of the 300-member Kelowna Right To Life. “We have been around since 1972, but we have a lower profile than in the earlier years. This is an attempt to get our message out a little stronger and build up the organization.”
Bartram has created a website; restarted the newsletter; is advertising on TV; has set up a speakers’ bureau; and will hold a golf tournament, a walk for life and a film festival in September. The controversial Life Chain on Hwy 97 happens twice a year.
He also uses Facebook and YouTube to get the message out, but one posting, called Sympathy for Morgentaler, was pulled because it contravened the site guidelines of not showing dead bodies. The piece is a protest against Dr. Henry Morgentaler receiving Canada’s highest honour.
“Since Morgentaler received the Order of Canada, our support has grown. We’re getting calls from people out of the blue, letters to the editor are from people I’ve never heard of before and we’re getting calls from churches on how they can get more involved. I’ll have to thank the Governor General for giving him the award if it rejuvenates the pro-life movement.”
While churches have always been involved, Bartram doesn’t consider the debate a religious issue. “I see it as a human rights issue. This is about whether that child in the womb is a human being with the right to life. I believe there is objective good and evil in the world and this force of evil is perpetuating abortion. One way it succeeds is that people who know better get discouraged. When you get discouraged, you’re only perpetuating the injustice and allowing it to continue.”
While his allies are few, they’re dedicated. Every week, about 50 show up alternately during the day to wear a groove in the pavement in front of KGH.
Neil and Frances Dalgleish have been walking the beat since 2002. “We are protesting the killing of innocent unborn children for no other reason than convenience,” says Neil, who notes that most people are gracious to the protesters. “But there is the odd one that will pass by swearing at us.”
Bartram agrees most people are considerate and the protesters “get more thumbs up than disrespect,” but they also get the middle digit, some people drive closer than necessary and signs have been damaged.
“There are strong feelings on both sides,” he says. “The pro-choice side sees it as a woman who has a right to do with her body what she wants. We see babies being killed and see that as a huge injustice, a great evil and must come to an end.”
He also thinks the media are unjust when they lump typical pro-lifers with the atypical ones who use violence. Seven abortion doctors have been killed in the United States while three were wounded in Canada.
“Ninety-nine point nine per cent of those in the pro-life movement do not condone the destruction of property or violence against abortionists,” Bartram says. “Kelowna Right to Life wholeheartedly condemns violence against unborn children and the abortionists who kill them.”
Counterpoint
Eileen Robinson doesn’t have too many rosy memories from when she started a local pro-choice group in 1990. The founding president of the Kelowna & District Pro-Choice Action Society remembers threats, nasty phone calls, letters and attempted intimidation. Even the people who answered the phones at the NDP constituency office when she was running for the legislature got caught in the backlash. “We’re going to vote against the baby killer,” was the essence of the calls she says.
And the night people from the Vernon Planned Parenthood came down to help the Kelowna group start a clinic, Robinson looked out into the darkness and the pouring rain to see 80 to 100 people protesting in front of the building.
“One night, after I had been on TV with Ted (Gerk, once long-time executive director of Kelowna Right to Life), I got a call ‘Hey. Lady, I know where you live.’” The voice then suggested Robinson should look under the hood of her car before she drove it, prompting her husband to ask if she was sure she wanted to keep going.
She did, the clinic opened and is operating today as Options for Sexual Health. She still doesn’t understand the rage against the group because it wasn’t pushing abortion, just giving people knowledge to make informed choices.
Robinson says the Pro-Choice Action Society was conceived, with about six other women, because “I just got fed up with hearing one side of the issue.”
Ruth Mellor, the current chair of the society, was one of the charter members in 1990. “I have had threatening phone calls; there was a threat on my life, but there haven’t been the threats of violence that there were in the early years.
“To me it’s a human rights issue,” Mellor says. “We are the voice of people who are in favour of choice, all choices. We’re not promoting abortions; we’re promoting safe abortions. No one says it’s easy or takes it lightly.”
Mellor longs for better, even free, birth control and is optimistic the morning-after pill will reduce abortions. “It already has. It’s not a dangerous medication and can be taken safely.”
Steadfast Belief
Bartram doesn’t share Mellor’s enthusiasm for the morning-after pill and considers it a form of abortion since he believes it terminates life that starts as soon at the sperm wiggles its way into the egg.
“We’re against anything that terminates an innocent human life after it has begun, which is conception. If left alone and given proper nutrients it will continue to grow.”
Bartram is aware a pro-life victory may not happen in his lifetime and points out that generations of people opposed slavery before it was ended.
“The institution of slavery rested on the notion that a certain group of human beings were not fully human. The Supreme Court declared that; the vast majority of politicians declared that and the majority of society believed that. Now, we have the same thing happening to the unborn child.”
So Bartram will walk that line taking solace in the fact that slavery abolitionists “came out on the right side of history” and remembering the quote attributed to Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
“I do believe that. The only thing I would change is good people and not just good men.”
Name: Marlon Bartram
Age: 45
Hometown: Kelowna
Currently lives in: Kelowna
Occupation: Executive director,
Kelowna Right To Life
Education: Bachelor’s Degree in social work from UBCO
Family: Mother, one brother, six sisters, two adult children
Hobbies: Reading, writing, following politics, motorcycle riding, golf, tennis, photography
Influential books:
The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom by David Kupelian; Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Arguments by Randy Alcorn; America Alone by Mark Steyn; The Unspoken Pain of Abortion by Dr. Theresa Burke; Philosophical Traditions by Louis Pojman; The Bible
Fights for: The right to life of unborn children
Website:
www.prolifekelowna.com
Main opposition: Bartram cites his chief adversary as “the lie that babies in the womb are non-persons”
The Other Point of View: Kelowna & District Pro-Choice Action Society, http://kelowna.cioc.ca/details.asp?RSN=458; Pro-Choice Action Network, www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org
The Legacy of Intent
Though she has long been a champion for community causes, and would rather be writing or teaching, Sharron Simpson is in the tug of war of her life with the City of Kelowna over the legalities of her family’s heritage. She won her first court battle, but city council — seeking to bring the zoning of covenant lands up to date — voted to appeal, a move that threatens to make this a central election issue.
by Dona Sturmanis
Sharron Simpson is composed as she stands beside her lawyer Tom Smithwick at the podium. As always, she is casually, nattily decked out in black pants, a red top and a striped seersucker jacket.
“We fought this on principle, an agreement that should be honoured,” she says into the microphone in the resonant, expressive voice of a seasoned public speaker. “I can’t believe it’s been a full five years. It’s my deepest hope the city would say the battle (over the Simpson Covenant) was over and an exciting opportunity to do something wonderful in the unique downtown properties … let’s find reasons to be creative and imaginative rather than reasons not to.”
Simpson is speaking at a press conference the morning of Aug. 14, 2008, at the Kelowna Yacht Club, called by her legal firm Porter Ramsay, to comment on the BC Supreme Court decision on her cause célèbre and to respond to the City of Kelowna’s reaction.
In 1946, Simpson’s grandfather, Stanley Merriam Simpson, sold 11.72 acres of prime downtown Kelowna real estate to the city, specifying that it was to be used for municipal, not commercial, purposes — an agreement now known as the Simpson Covenant.
When city council voted to remove the covenant in April of last year to change zoning in the area, Simpson formed the Save the Heritage Simpson Covenant Society, which eventually took the issue to the BC Supreme Court.
Simpson and the society directors have won their court case, but this press conference is also about responding to the city’s Aug. 13, 2008, press release on the ruling.
“Further examination may now be needed to ensure that no commercial or industrial use is taking place on land covered by the covenant, including city hall, Kelowna museum, Memorial Arena and the yacht club,” Mayor Sharon Shepherd said.
Does that mean removal of the yacht club, no shop at the museum and no hot dogs at arena games?
“It’s a plethora of obfuscation,” Simpson’s lawyer Tom Smithwick says at the press conference.
It occurs to me that this must be an activist’s ultimate dream — to announce a victory for her flagship cause to the city’s media and watch the resulting coverage in the newspapers, on television, web and radio.
But I know Simpson would think otherwise. So often have I heard her say, “I take media coverage with a grain of salt.”
Three Weeks Earlier — Writing and Reminiscing
Inside the Kelowna Yacht Club, where Simpson is an honorary member, we are escorted to a sunny table, where we are served fresh coffee, cold water and handed menus.
The yacht club sits on some of that land her grandfather, Stanley Merriam Simpson, sold to the City of Kelowna over six decades ago.
Simpson is a handsome, meticulously-groomed woman who doesn’t believe in revealing her age. It’s hard to tell anyway — her well-chiseled, experienced face lights up as she speaks, her brown eyes dart and she flashes a mercurial smile.
Before we talk about the covenant we catch up on personal details. Simpson has been a friend of mine for over a decade because of our mutual interests and experiences with writing, publishing, teaching and people we know in common.
“Here’s my latest book,” she says almost shyly, proffering a copy of her just-released The First 100 Years: Kelowna General Hospital 1908-2008. Last year, it was Deep Roots, Strong Branches: A History of Sun-Rype Products Ltd, which she co-authored with Ian F. Greenwood.
The First 100 Years is an attractive publication and on first breeze through, appears full of the scrupulous research Simpson is known for.
“And here’s some money for your two poetry books you sold when you came to visit the Memories into Memoirs class at the museum.”
She hands me two five-dollar bills, an example of one of Simpson’s hallmark traits — thoughtfulness. I feel touched she would even remember or bother. It was almost two years ago that I visited the class to talk to her students about poetry.
There were about 30 lively, chattering seasoned participants that Simpson had inspired over time to put down the stories of their lives on paper. As instructor, she was enthusiastic, beaming and had very personal rapport with each student.
“There were three prerequisites for people to join the class — you couldn’t be a writer, you had nothing to say and nobody was interested in what you had to say,” she says as we reminisce. “We focused on storytelling, not grammar or structure. What I saw was an astounding growth in confidence in their writing abilities.”
The result was an annual anthology series of these personal stories, some of which were reproduced in their handwritten form. In its second year of publication, the series garnered a BC Heritage Award for being such a unique way to preserve history.
This museum writing program is just one example of Simpson’s activist commitments — the preservation of Kelowna’s heritage. When she was chair of the Community Heritage Commission, she advocated preservation of the city’s built heritage.
She eventually gave up her much-loved classes after seven years and 10 publications. This fall, she will be teaching a new course on memoir writing in the community and continuing studies department of the University of British Columbia Okanagan.
Over our leisurely lunch of summery sandwiches and salads, I ask her how she would describe herself.
“I think the word is feisty,” she says. “It comes from having a strong sense of justice and fairness. Those are qualities a bit elusive in this fast-changing world.”
Simpson had a high profile seven-year career in the late ’80s to early ’90s as city councillor, which gave her a platform to articulate her position on a wide variety of municipal issues. During that time, she also made a difference by chairing the Central Okanagan Regional District, the Okanagan Basin Water Board, the Okanagan Mainline Labour Relations Board, the Okanagan Mainline Municipal Association, and co-chairing or being a board member of other groups including the Union of BC Municipalities and the BC Municipal Finance Authority.
“This experience made me have opinions on things I might normally not have opinions on,” she says as we peruse our menus.
She ran for mayor against Jim Stuart in 1993 and lost.
That didn’t stop her. Simpson continued her activism in everything from aboriginal rights to heritage to land use issues.
“The Simpson Convenant is more than a land use issue,” she says. “It’s also a heritage issue and a moral issue. It involves all of these things.
“I took it on because I was the keeper of the information. I had the family files and city files on the original covenant,” she says. “It is part of my family history. I’m the story keeper. And this ties back to me wanting to preserve stories of the community.” She speaks firmly, but with a softness that indicates absolute sincerity about preserving her grandfather’s covenant.
We digress from this for a moment to talk about the book she wrote about him — Boards, Boxes, and Bins: Stanley M. Simpson and the Interior Lumber Industry, published in 2003.
“My grandfather was part of my life but I really never knew him. Writing the book and talking to many people gave me a far better understanding of the man than I ever had before. The search for information about Stan took me across the country, both physically and through the Internet.” She also talked to many former employees of his company, S.M. Simpson Ltd., once the area’s largest year-round employer.
In addition to writing Boards, Boxes, and Bins, Simpson established Manhattan Beach Publishing and the beginning of a new career as a freelance writer, author and editor. She’s studied writing, not just locally, but at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Oxford University Summer School in England.
“I also just got back from a writing workshop with Natalie Goldberg in Taos, New Mexico. Now that was an experience.” Natalie Goldberg is an internationally known author and writing guru, she’s a Buddhist who has some rather unconventional methods of teaching. “When I was there, I was thinking, what is somebody like me doing here? But it really was a pretty amazing experience.”
The Campaign to Preserve a Grandfather’s Intent
Over more coffee, we return to the covenant issue.
Simpson was already concerned about the state of the covenant when in July 2004, development on covenant lands of the proposed Jim Stuart Park as a centennial legacy project the following year was put on hold by the city. The public learned about a potential multi-million dollar mega-development by Edmonton’s Westcorp Properties Inc. called Pandosy (Lawson’s) Landing that would cover a four-acre site at the foot of Bernard Avenue including about a third of the future Jim Stuart Park and parking lot on the south end of the property.
The development, an unprecedented concept for downtown Kelowna, included four 16- to 28-storey high-rises (one hotel and three residential), retail stores and a 120-slip marina.
“I called a press conference to remind the public of the Simpson Covenant that had been attached to the land for six decades. Other people didn’t know the details. City staff knew the information existed and had known it existed for 60 years. I had the information and was in position to do something about it.”
The proposed development was turned down by the city planning commission in August of that year, because it was contrary to the official community plan. But the ensuing four years occupied her time and energy as controversy erupted over the legitimacy of the covenant with debate going on in public, the media and with the city. “There were a lot of meetings behind closed doors,” she recalls.
Simpson says the greatest challenge has been keeping the issue in the public eye.
“You can’t keep the profile up there all the time over four years. There have been many issues and the covenant floated in and out of the public consciousness during that time,” she says. “So we also put out a petition and got a thousand signatures. I don’t know that city hall gets petitions with that many signatures very often. It was in a number of businesses around town. It was almost like a groundswell of really divergent people coming together. We can’t use it as evidence in court; it’s not a legal document. And city hall usually ignores them, but we submitted it to them anyway.”
Simpson has used a variety of techniques to promote the issue. “Press conferences …. I’ve done letters to the editor. I’ve also given talks to various groups. I also worked behind the scenes for four years with council and city staff to resolve this issue.”
She agrees that many of the covenant issues, for all of the complexities and wrangling over technicalities that have taken place between the society and the city, have been somewhat open to a matter of interpretation.
“The covenant was framed in the language of the time and the legal obligations of the day and now things have changed. And it was very clear that land was to be retained for the use and enjoyment by people of Kelowna. This was the intent of the original document and we feel this needs to be acknowledged by leaving the covenant in place.”
While Simpson says city council does not support her position, she says she sees it in the public. “They are very supportive of me. They stop me in the grocery store and at any event I go to. They are disappointed in the city that they would do this, an unfortunate precedent it sets for other generous citizens who wish to leave either property or money to the city.
“If there are people out there who don’t agree with me, they just don’t talk to me,” she observes with a chuckle.
Sharron Simpson has few regrets but one might be that she “speaks off the cuff a lot … my life isn’t scripted. I’m sure I’ve said a million things that I shouldn’t have said. The only time I’m cautious is when it comes to legal matters. Otherwise, I don’t have any hesitation.”
“Do you think you’re going to win?” I ask as we prepare to leave.
“I’m cautiously optimistic the society’s case will succeed through the BC Supreme Court,” she says. “But it’s more than the legal, it’s also the ethical and the historical issues. I think we have already won from an ethical and historical point of view, even if we lose in court. From my point of view, it was the honourable thing to do — fight to retain my grandfather’s intent.”
I telephone the office of Kelowna mayor Sharon Shepherd to see if she will talk about the covenant. I am surprised when she calls back a couple of days later; she won’t talk about that, but she does talk about Simpson.
They’re both women who have been in Kelowna politics a long time and have actively advocated a wide number of social issues. Their names are sometimes mixed up in public because of their semantic similarities.
“I knew her as a city councillor in the early ’90s and have watched her career since I have been elected,” says Mayor Shepherd in her soft voice. “Sharron is from our city, has a very good history in our city. People who have been in our community a long time are very aware of her and support many of the concerns she brings forward. It’s important for people to feel comfortable enough to stand up for things they believe in, but also initiatives that will change the community.”
Counterpoint
For its part, the City of Kelowna has been understandably quiet in the midst of legal proceedings, with city councillors and staff difficult to reach for public comment on the city’s motivations in seeking to remove the Simpson Covenant. But a city press release, dated April 26, 2007, makes it clear that the intent is to rezone the lands in question in order to ensure public access to the waterfront: “The Kelowna Sawmill Covenant was placed on these properties at the time of sale to the city and restricted the use to municipal purposes. The proposed rezoning would go much further adding important legislative and legal strength by preserving the original parcels of land, and more, for the public’s use as park. With a rezoning to P3 (Park), the city would be taking concrete steps to not only maintain the spirit and intent of the 1945 council, but to strengthen and enhance it by guaranteeing public accessibility and green space along the waterfront.
“The Kelowna Sawmill Covenant never guaranteed these lands would be public park. The covenant only stipulated the lands be for municipal use, not commercial or industrial, that buildings be attractive and suitably landscaped and that the property not be sold.
“‘If council agrees to the staff recommendations,’ notes David Shipclark, director of corporate services, ‘we will be able to preserve public access to Okanagan Lake throughout the downtown. After all there was no provision in the Kelowna Sawmill Covenant for public access to the waterfront, and no provision for parkland. The new arrangement would guarantee both.’
“Rezoning would protect the public’s use of these lands in a more regulated and formal fashion through tighter land use restrictions; restrictions that could legally be enforced through zoning regulations. In addition rezoning offers a better guarantee of public use into the future, since land use could only be changed through an open formal public hearing process.”
Battle Won, but War Continues
As of press time, Aug. 20, 2008, the Simpson Covenant issue is not over. In another press release, the City of Kelowna announced that it is appealing the BC Supreme Court decision because “the court determined that the covenant is not valid, but does exist as a charitable trust.
“The city will ask the appeal court to clarify whether it was possible to create a trust under common law. The court accepted the city’s position that under 1945 legislation the city did not have authority to accept the lands on trust.
“The city will ask the appeal court to rule on whether a charitable trust can be established when land is not gifted. The city purchased the land in 1946.”
Simpson is obviously not finished her fight yet. But as of press time, Mayor Shepherd has publicly stated that in the November municipal election, “I intend as part of my campaign to run on the basis of promoting the election of a council that will support the defeat of the appeal of the covenant.”
And when it’s finally over, if ever, Simpson speculates that her activist days will be done.
“I have no aspiration to get back into politics,” she says. “I don’t have a mission. My most endearing project is to teach my course in the fall and collect early stories of Kelowna. I might also be looking for some type of Third World involvement if there is something small I can do to help, just because I am so troubled by the inequities of the world.”
Four More Crusaders of Note
They’re not quite as controversial as our first four, but these activists still demonstrate commitment, and sometimes even a sense of humour, for the causes they champion.
by Dona Sturmanis
Sinikka Crosland
Animals’ Angel
Sinikka Crosland is a retired registered nurse fulfilling a lifelong mission to help save animals at risk. She lives and works her commitment on a Westside acreage with her husband, daughter and an assortment of rescued animals including two horses. She’s also co-founder and president of The Responsible Animal Care Society (TRACS), co-founder and executive director of the Canadian Horse Defense Coalition and a director with the International Fund for Horses.
Since before she was 10, Crosland’s been passionate about animals, including horses. Two decades later, her first equine companion, Kelly, mesmerized her “with his wit, loyalty and humour and I learned the language of horses.” In 1994, she aided in a local neglected horse crisis and read articles regarding the pregnant mare urine (PMU) industry with its resulting slaughter of foals.
Since then, TRACS has rescued hundreds of displaced PMU horses including the purchase of a 10-horse herd from a BC feedlot during the 2003 BC wildfires. New homes were found for them all.
“The TRACS mandate is multi-faceted — compassion to all living beings, all species, the environment as well,” says the vibrant and committed activist. Currently, the society is fighting to save farm animals, domestic pets, seals, wildlife, horses … and wild rabbits on the streets of Kelowna.
“The mission at the Canadian Horse Defense Coalition is to seek a ban on horse slaughter in Canada and abroad.”
Websites, newsletters, email, word-of-mouth and media releases garner supporters.
“The more we spread the word, the more supportive people become,” says Crosland.
www.tracs-bc.ca
www.defendhorsescanada.org
www.fund4horses.org
Grant Baudet
Freedom Fighter
for the Individual
Kelowna’s Grant Baudet spends his time informing people on a variety of issues like monetary reform; bills like C51, which would put controls on access to natural health supplements; and the stand that treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are unnecessary.
“Governments are supposed to be acting in our best interest, but they act more in the interests of corporations and themselves,” says the active member of the Canadian Action Party, who ran as a candidate for the BC Action Party in 2001. “They are influenced by the interests of big corporations.”
Baudet became an activist a decade ago after researching subjects like human rights and tax laws (“income tax is no longer as certain as death”), then became involved with the Canadian Action Party, which has the best interest of the individual as its philosophy.
“I do my research on the Internet. It’s the only independent source we have left; the media isn’t telling us the truth,” he says. “We have to do our own due diligence, educate ourselves and get others to start asking questions rather than accept the status quo.”
Baudet gets his word out through letters to the editor (“which rarely appear”), email, small rallies and information handouts.
With a history of jobs in the business and financial sector, Baudet finds his mission monetarily challenging, but remains encouraged by the supporters he’s hooked up with on the Internet and at rallies.
“Success is not going to happen overnight. We have to reach people out there to rethink things, get out and initiate change.”
www.canadianactionparty.ca
www.naturalperson.com
www.prisonplanet.com
Shirley Fitzpatrick
Issue-Tuned Grandma
The idea of an angry grandmother may be a disturbing image, but Raging Grannies spread their message in a benign and entertaining way by writing songs and skits about government, environmental and social issues that concern them and performing in costume at public events. Dressing in stereotype granny gear — shawls, skirts, floppy hats and knitting needles — helps get them the attention to be heard.
Shirley Fitzpatrick is a matter-of-fact grandma, one of a dozen who answered the first call for Raging Grannies in Kelowna in 1998, three of whom remain members 10 years later. The movement, started in Victoria, BC, by a group of women experienced in protest and street theatre, has since spread across Canada, the United States and around the world.
“We live to make the world a better place for our grandchildren,” she says. “We all want to be safe, have good food, have no guns and bombs and have peace. We don’t make a tremendous difference; we just raise the topic.”
The daughter of a Vancouver Island farmer, Fitzpatrick has always been environmentally concerned and involved with groups such as the Central Okanagan Naturalist Club, the Kelowna Peace Group and the Council of Canadians. Some of her specific peeves include agreements that are signed without public consent between governments — regional or international — and their effect on local issues.
“We aren’t told about many things. We’re just becoming pawns of whoever controls these,” says Fitzpatrick.
The grandes dames come up with their material by agreeing on issues they want to sing about, then set out to learn enough from books and articles to pen their performance lyrics.
“I can say to my grandchildren I’m trying to make my world a better place, not sitting at home knitting or watching TV all the time,” says Fitzpatrick.
www.raginggrannies.ca
James Baker
Pro-(Long-Term)
Planning Politician
OK, so he’s an elected politician. But Lake Country mayor James Baker is a firm believer that municipal government should engage in long-term, holistic planning — not something very common in the world of short-term, next-election politics. “If you understand it, you can predict it,” he says. A retired Okanagan University College anthropology and archeology instructor, he brings a cultural, historical and environmental perspective to his political role.
This means developing a long-term integrated official plan for Lake Country that takes into account its appeal and character as a community and provides urban services for its rural lifestyle.
“It may mean we come to a finite population in our area,” he says.
Respect for the needs of people in a community are important to Baker in developing such an integrated, long-term plan.
“We are working closely with the Okanagan Indian Band because the courts say they have traditional rights to land. We are respecting their rights and titles.”
He’s also working hard to make Lake Country totally accessible to people in wheelchairs, help those with disabilities become employed and develop affordable housing.
“Sustainability is not just economic but concerns lifestyle,” says Baker. “As proof we make use of volunteers to provide expertise and advice to make our community a better place to live.”
Respect for the environment is also key to a successful long-term community plan. Baker has recently been lobbying the provincial government against allowing recreational lots on Crown land abutting lakes and reservoirs to be sold off because of potential harm to community water supplies by public usage.
Baker is optimistic with his municipal planning approach. “We’re trying to provide reasons it’s very logical to do it our way,” he says. “It’s not just a matter of putting it in the bank right now, but taking a long-term perspective.”
www.lakecountry.bc.ca
Do you know of a local activist that should be profiled? Let us know by emailing editorial@okanaganlife.com |
