Editorially speaking...
In my recent series on the Leech River gold rush I made several references to Vancouver Island colonial governor Arthur Edward Kennedy.
Colonial Governor Arthur Kennedy didn’t mince words. Tofino area’s Kennedy Lake commemorates his brief posting to Vancouver Island.—Wikipedia
A former soldier and the seasoned governor of numerous British outposts, he’d obviously gained some insight into human nature by the time he came to the Island.
Take, for example, his visit to the Leech River diggings when he lectured the miners on their drinking habits. While disclaiming to be a teetotaller, and while not objecting to a man taking a glass of grog, he solemnly warned them that drink, indulged in too freely, ruined a man, body and soul.
He concluded by declaring that many of the miners “earned their money like horses and spent it like asses”.
But my favourite quote refers to Vancouver Islanders generally:
“There are I fear but two classes here—those who are convicts and those who ought to be convicts.”
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As of last report, the renaming of George Jay Elementary School is still under consideration by the Victoria School Board and local First Nations. It’s the result of onetime city alderman and school board chairman Jay having been deposed because of his virulent racist views in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
But he directed his prejudice at Chinese Canadian students and, in a letter to the editor of the Times Colonist, Alanne Gibson has urged that the school be given a name “meaningful to all”.
Victoria has produced some outstanding Canadians of Chinese descent and it would seem appropriate, in my opinion, to honour all Chinese Canadians by honouring one of their own.
Reconciliation shouldn’t apply strictly to Canada’s Indigenous peoples but to all Canadian pioneers and citizens who were discriminated against in the past. The Victoria School Board has been given that opportunity.
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Friend and Chronicles subscriber Stephanie informs me that she found a hardbound copy of my book, Ghost Town Trails of Vancouver Island, which has been in continuous print since 1975.
That’s almost (shudder) half a century!
