The little search engine that could

My hat is off to Anne Crossman and Tom Zubko at Permafrost Media for finally accessing the costs associated with the Joint Review Panel.

For those of you who don’t know, Permafrost Media is an aggregate news gathering service funded solely by donations and Mr. Zubko himself. This tiny operation of one employee achieved what no other news gathering organization had the balls, budget or news sense to go after.

I wouldn’t expect this brand of investigative journalism to come from the Frostbite Falls Fishwrap, where reporters are only concerned with investigating how they will fill this week’s quota of filler to slap in around the ads. Most reporters won't be there long enough to take something like this on. 

The Commie Broadcast Corp. has shown no interest in this either. Had this been Lee “Geraldo” Selleck going after the underpants budget of an elected official, you’d have bet the Comrades would have ponied up the dough.

Geraldo didn’t think this one was worth going after, however. Nor did their “business” reporter Green Julie.

Since Julie helped add to the burden of the JRP with her own intervention through the Yellowknife YWCA, I suppose she felt it would be a conflict of interest. Not sure just how the Yellowknife YWCA felt they would be harmed by a pipeline carrying natural gas hundreds of miles away, but that’s the way this regulatory abomination unfolded.

Kevin O’Reilly and his merry band of fear-mongering eco-thugs lined up every NGO, rabble-rouser, tea granny and out-of-work proposal writer in the NWT and showed them how to get a budget to intervene in this pipeline project. All they had to do was to show up and speak for 20 or 90 minutes and they would be given a plane ticket and a budget -- all courtesy the Canadian taxpayer.

They were very organized and saw the biggest flaw in the whole process.

In their attempt to re-create the Berger-like forum, the JRP allowed anyone with a voice to speak to the panel and question the project’s proponents.

And speak they did. Hundreds of hours of testimony was heard and hundreds of thousands of pages were submitted.

From our wood pellet smoking MP Dennis Bevington, who urged the slumbering panel of dimwits to take their time, to the World Wildlife Fund, Sierra Club and Alternatives North who heaped redundant and massive amounts of paper into the system. So many questions were posed to the proponent Imperial Oil that they actually choked and had to postpone the process until they could catch up.

If this technical terrorism was enough to choke Canada’s largest oil company, it really should not come as a surprise that this collection of absolute amateurs cannot get the job done.

That doesn’t stop them from drawing paychecks, however. At $500 a day for each panel member, they have sucked over $18 million from the taxpayers’ pockets.

Five years have come and gone since this process began and there is no end in sight. They make no excuse for their gross incompetence and offer another date of December 2009. There is no guarantee that they won’t change that date either.

Meanwhile, the poverty-stricken people of the Mackenzie Valley postpone their legacy. Mothers feed pop from baby bottles because milk is too expensive. Suicide and substance abuse rates continue to climb far beyond the national average. Type 2 diabetes is an epidemic. Graduation rates are deplorable. Housing is a national disgrace.

But yes, panel members, do take your time, as the Groucho Marxist MP urged you. Take your time, take our money, postpone the legacy and sleep well. 

Tourist typist goes shopping

With the revolving door of tourist typists moving in and out of the ranks of the Frostbite Falls Fishwrap, it’s hard to keep tabs on who’s who.

Each time we get a new reporter here, we have to endure the training period of this newbie, who gets scared out of bed when a fighter jet flies overhead or when he plays mix and match on the names and faces of the people in Streetbeat.

You’d think by now the Fishwrap would have a policy on topics these tourists should avoid writing about. Obviously they don’t, so I’ll help them out here.

This week’s Inuvik Dumb has an editorial titled “Getting the shaft,” where he whimpers about the high price of food here. The typist drones on about his trip to Whitehorse, where he found lower-priced food than Inuvik. What a revelation! Your Pulitzer is in the mail, Mr. Editor.

Here’s the first paragraph:

“Living in Inuvik, I go through phases where I lose track of the outside world and just accept certain things, good and bad, about living in a remote location.”

For starters, maybe your world exists outside Inuvik, but your readers’ world is right here. Maybe you feel Inuvik is remote, but this is the home of your readers. We all know you’re a tourist. You don’t need to remind us each week. 

As bad as this rag is, this is our newspaper -- not your fucking travelogue. Maybe your parents or buddies back home might appreciate hearing about your adventures on your little trip to our "remote" town, but you're paid to record the history of this place. 

Secondly, people who live here don’t need to be reminded of the cost of food. They’ve been paying it long before you stepped off the plane for your arctic adventure.

It gets worse. He moans on about paying $10 year-round for two litres of milk. I don’t know where he’s been buying his milk, but even when the road was out, I've never paid more than $9. 

The tourist calls for an “arm’s length government body” that would monitor the price of food on store shelves. Hate to break news to the news guy, but we already have that in place – it’s called the “free market.”

We have three grocery stores here that are all competing for our food dollar. The intrepid reporter might get off his lazy ass and go price check himself.

Another tip for the news guy: if you spend less time driving to Whitehorse and more time covering your beat, you might actually gain some credibility with your readers.

On a brighter note, I see the Fishwrap has snagged a shining star with the addition of Katie May. While the tourist was away shopping in Whitehorse, Katie picked up the slack in this week’s Dumb, with some fine news writing.

I’ll be sad to see her go, but that’s the reality. The good ones come for the experience and move on to the dailies in the south. The rest (like the mouth-breathing meat blob, Piggy Puglia) will go uncalled for and resort to spell checking in the integrity-free zone of the Fishwrap’s newsroom.