EDITORIAL – How Coun. Karpuk blew it on the Fartgate file
Coun. Stephen Karpuk. (Image: CFJC Today)
An editorial by Mel Rothenburger.
DID YOU HEAR THE ONE about the City councillor who accused the mayor of telling a fart joke at a dinner event? Turns out the councillor blew it.
We may as well laugh about Coun. Stephen Karpuk’s humiliating faux pas. If we don’t, we just might cry over the City Hall gong show.
During the Councillors Reports section of Tuesday’s meeting agenda — that’s where councillors get a chance to toot their own horns — Karpuk said he was “embarrassed” and “disgusted” when Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson made a fart joke at a Kamloops Homebuilders Association function.
During a discussion of green energy, Karpuk insisted, the mayor had asked, “So you’d like us to fart more to produce more green energy?”
Didn’t happen, replied the mayor.
But Karpuk gave the mayor’s denial the bum’s rush.
The heated exchange, immediately dubbed Fartgate, brought new meaning to the term F-bomb, and resulted in a round of fart puns in the media and online — predictable stuff about clearing the air, a smelly situation and all that. Some wondered why Karpuk didn’t take it up with the mayor privately. Others questioned why he mentioned it at all.
Then, yesterday morning, the councillor was suddenly making the rounds of radio stations apologizing to the mayor, staff, council and the entire city for wrongly accusing the mayor.
The fart line that everyone in the room had supposedly heard wasn’t the mayor’s at all. It came from a table behind Karpuk.
It was, by no means, a perfect apology. While claiming to “own” his mistake, Karpuk blamed it on stress and emotion brought on by pressures and by other comments the mayor had made on other topics.
That’s not “owning it.” “Owning it” means you don’t make excuses. You just apologize.
But, hey, at least he did offer an apology. So, fortunately, this latest City Hall controversy has run out of gas.
That, at least, is how this old fart sees it.
I’m Mel Rothenburger, the Armchair Mayor.
Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Coun. Karpuk (AKA the Fartmaester) has unwittingly blew the lid off the fragile image that Council was trying to portray – a victimhood approach where they are the assailed, at the hands of a totally unreasonable Mayor. This is simply not the case, and Coun. Karpuk effectively said the quiet parts out loud, that it is Council that is doing the very things they accuse the Mayor of.
Mel has it right – this was a non apology, likely born out of fear of his name being added the defendant list.
It’s not the fart that is the joke here, but Council itself.
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If anyone has not yet taken in the Tuesday Matinée at the city hall theatre well.. it’s quite the show. A smattering of twists, surprise attacks, passive aggressiveness, eye rolling and an abundance of contempt. It’s riveting. Bring your own popcorn.
I jest of course, only to prevent my head from spinning right off my neck.
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Another great editorial, Mel.
Good old fashioned Wild West politics in the line of the Blazing Saddles campfire scene.
Who’s next to take one for the Team?
I’ve shared the link with my family whose members live from Nanaimo to east of London, Ontario.
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The so-called apology sounded a lot like the common criminal MP Svend Robinson using the excuse of job-induced stress as the reason he “snapped” and stole a diamond ring a number of years ago. It seems one of the first things many politicians learn, perhaps during their initial orientation session, is the technique of never taking personal responsibility or admitting a mistake. Yes, we’re all human. Nobody expects perfection. We do, however, expect genuine behavior, and doing the job you were elected to do. The “job-induced stress” part sounded like he was also blaming the Mayor for that stress. This Council needs to understand once and for all that despite the fact that neither Arjun Singh or Dieter Dudy were elected Mayor, which is what they were obviously expecting, this is indeed what they signed up for when they ran for election. Making a full-time job of bucking the Mayor at every turn, as a couple of councillors in particular have done, is getting really tiresome. This duly-elected Mayor, for better or worse, made it abundantly clear that if elected, he was not going to merely maintain the status quo. If they wanted to be Mayor, which seems to be the case, then they should have run for the position, as others had the jam to do. But, they didn’t, So, time to be adults, quit with the protracted temper tantrum, get over your perpetually-offended selves, and get to work.
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Well said, Ken.
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