Talk about your dog days of summer
Armchair Mayor column, The Kamloops Daily News, Aug. 1, 2009
“Dog Days of summer. . . the hottest, most sultry days of summer. . . . Dog Days can also define a time period or event that is very hot or stagnant, or marked by dull lack of progress.”
Boy, talk about your Dog Days. I don’t recall another time in Kamloops when it was this torpid. If things were any slower we’d be going backwards. It’s stickier than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. As granny used to say, it’s so dull you could ride to London on it.
“The ancients sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.”
But I’m not talking about the weather. I’m talking Kamloops politics.
Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. We’ve gone from nasty and fun to nice and boring.
Whatever happened to the days when Betty would push Terry, Terry would push Betty, and tempers would flare?
Ah, those were good times in the news game. Betty would snark at everyone in sight, Terry would grump away at Betty and there was never a dull moment, always a good headline.
Now, we’ve got Mr. Nice Guy at the helm in City Hall, Ms. Manners working for us in Ottawa, Terry retired to the back benches in Victoria, and Kevin — well, OK, we’ve still got Kevin.
Even Kamloops and the regional district get along like kissing cousins. I remember when rural directors used City directors for target practice. John Taylor, Chris O’Connor and others would sit there and grouch away about how Kamloops was always trying to run the show, and City directors would calmly point out that Kamloops taxpayers were paying for 54 per cent of the TNRD so they darn well should run the show.
One day, rural directors were so ticked off with Kamloops they staged a walkout during a board meeting. These days, the mayor of Kamloops not only gets along with regional directors, they elected him chair of the board.
You don’t have much to write about when everybody is happy.
As one newsroom observer put it the other day, we’ve gone from red hot to beige in local politics.
Take Peter Milobar, for example. He gets a little impatient at times, but has anyone ever heard him actually utter an unkind word? He is Mr. Steady As She Goes, Mr. Let’s All Just Get Along.
His campaign slogan was “A Balanced Approach,” for crying out loud.
At the Communities In Bloom dinner this week, Milobar was in fine form (he’s turned into a very good public speaker), having just returned from a meeting of regional district chairs in Vancouver. Returning to Kamloops, he said, always makes him appreciate “how dysfunctional the rest of the province is.”
Elaborating later, he said that in other jurisdictions, there’s a lot of scrapping among agencies and boards that are supposed to work together. Whereas, here, everything is lovey dovey in comparison.
“Dog Days were popularly believed to be an evil time ‘when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies’.”
The only mad dogs here are going nuts from boredom. We could use a few hysterics to liven things up. Maybe a phrensy or two.
We’re sure not going to get them from Cathy McLeod. From Betty to Cathy, we’ve gone from the ridiculous to the sublime. It’s supposed to be the other way around.
The media, on a slow day, could always depend on Betty to come through with something bizarre or at least a dissertation on how everybody other than the Tories was doing everything wrong.
It seems like only yesterday I was in Ottawa with the mayor of a small Interior town not far from Kamloops, standing in the hallway of the Parliament Buildings getting a lecture from Betty about how politics really works.
“What a —!” the mayor quietly exclaimed after Betty walked away (I will allow you to fill in the blank).
Now we’ve got Cathy, a truly pleasant, hard-working woman who builds relationships instead of destroys them. It’s almost enough to think Conservatives aren’t so bad after all. Note, I said almost.
“Dog days. 1. the period between early July and early September when the hot sultry weather of summer usually occurs in the northern hemisphere 2. a period of stagnation or inactivity.”
To be precise, in Ancient Rome, the Dog Days were officially between July 24 through Aug. 24, which fits Kamloops pretty well in any given year.
Any Kamloopsian knows it takes longer to get things done in the summer. Everybody is at the beach. I fear, though, that when it comes to local politics we may be in for a prolonged period of beigeness that goes way beyond September.
Kevin might be our only hope. Happy B.C. Day.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
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