A retired reporter remembers his many contacts with the Trudeau legend

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

Seeing Justin Trudeau in Cranbrook’s Rotary Park last week sure brings back the memories and raises some intriguing political questions as well. But let’s start with the memories first.

Memories? Well, this old fart, retired reporter goes back a long way with the Trudeau’s. Way back in the fall of 1965, I shared a SFU political science class with Justin’s mother, the inestimable Margaret Sinclair or “Maggie” Trudeau as she later came to be known. She wasn’t famous then. Her sister Rosalind was better known and considered by many to be more beautiful. But then Maggie met Pierre and many of you know the rest of that Gothic tale. Cue the Rolling Stones and Studio 54.

Then there the 1980’s when I covered Pierre several times when he passed through Kamloops on campaign stops. The most memorable of these was when he was speaking at the old KXA barn which passed for a convention centre in Kamloops in those days. Turns out Pierre had an old Trudeau cousin that lived in Kamloops who they hauled on stage to shake his hand before he spoke. As luck would have it, I was on the stage too about 20 feet away with my notebook and trusty old, Russian camera when the cousin stumbled as he was reaching to shake Pierre’s hand and fell dead at his feet of a massive coronary.

Needless to say all hell broke loose.

We had a photographer there but I was closer so I felt I better get a shot or my editor would have fired me the next day. (not an imaginary possibility) So I took a few steps closer and took a couple quick pics of the poor old gentleman on the floor as Trudeau’s handlers moved in threatening to punch me out. I got the hell out of there only to read quotes in the Globe and Mail the next day from the same Liberal heavies denouncing me as a “ghoul.” There was some truth to that.

Anyway, a few years later Trudeau passed through Kamloops again on another campaign and I was writing up a story on his brief stop when a story crackled over the wire that he had raised his middle, index finger to a crowd that was heckling him at a Salmon Arm railway platform. (Those were the good ol’ days when politicians still campaigned on trains and had the courage to make unscripted gestures. Sigh!)

Many years pass and I’m toiling in the trenches for the Cranbrook Daily Townsman when publisher Steen Jorgenson was kind enough to send me and the good wife to the Chateau Lake Louise to cover young Justin Trudeau and his then fiancé Sophie Gregoire who were appearing at an avalanche awareness seminar after the tragic death of Justin’s brother Michel at the age of 23 in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. Justin wasn’t yet an MP at the time but it was obvious he was getting ready for a career in politics. I was introduced to him and we got to talking about a lot of things including the bizarre incident with the death of his father’s cousin in Kamloops. Justin said Pierre was quite shaken up by the incident and told him at the tender age of 10 or so there was a political lesson to be learned from it – no more “add on’s” at campaign stops.

A few years later, I was hiking in Kokanee Park on the same trail where the avalanche swept away Michel Trudeau to his death Nov. 16, 1998, a day before my birthday. I have to admit it gave me a very spooky feeling to think of his body in the frigid, glacier water just below my feet. It’s very sad to think of the annual pilgrimage members of the Trudeau family make every year to mark his demise.

But life endures and now it’s Justin carrying the heavy banner of the Trudeau legend. Will he become the first Prime Minister’s son in Canada to succeed his father as the nation’s political leader?

Naturally there’s no way of knowing, but on a hot Sunday afternoon in Cranbrook’s Rotary Park Justin Pierre James Trudeau showed every sign his celebrated father’s charisma still burns.

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Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.

It’s time to rethink forest fire deaths

Perceptions by Gerry Warner

The “fire triangle.” Every firefighter knows this deadly triangle – fuel, oxygen and heat. When these three elements act in unison you get fire, sometimes deadly fire as was the horrifying case in Arizona last week when these three elements came together and the tragic result was 19 dead members of the elite Granite Mountain Hotshots forest fire fighting team.

This tragedy, the worst in U.S. history since the deadly fire year of 1910 when drought, lightning and tinder-dry fuel in the forest combined to set off the Big Blowup or the Devil’s Broom fire, a conflagration that blackened more than three million once-green acres in Idaho, Montana and south-eastern B.C. The blaze, possibly the biggest ever in North American history, killed 87 firefighters but that was over at least a week. To the best of this writer and former forest fire fighter’s knowledge, 19 killed in one night in a single forest fire incident is the worst such incident ever.

And quite honestly it sends shivers down my spine when I think back to the decade or so when I fought forest fires when no other work was available. Thanks to dumb luck – it certainly wasn’t brains – I never got trapped by an out-of-control wildfire although I had one close incident in 1967 deep in a canyon near the north end of Kootenay Lake, and just like the tragic Yarnell fire the wind suddenly shifted. But one critical factor was playing in my favour unlike the situation when the Hot Shot team perished .

In my case, the wind shift change came late in the afternoon, and even though visibility was poor, it was daylight and I could see the wind change direction and I could feel it as well. As soon as I realized this, I quickly turned around and with the water pump tank on my back – or “piss cans” as we fire fighters called them in those days,” – I started to lope up the fire guard we’d cut down the slope as fast as I could. Puffing like crazy about three –quarters of the way up the steep guard, I decided there was no good reason to be carrying about 30 pounds of water with me so I paused long enough to catch my wind and dump the water out of my five gallon tank. I then scampered up to safety probably not fully appreciating the potential tragedy I had just avoided.

But, and details are still sketchy, it appears the Arizona fire fighters weren’t so lucky because it was night time when the wind made it’s tragic direction change and they were above the fire below them. You can easily figure out the rest. As we all know, heat rises, and because of this, forest fires burn much faster uphill than they do down. Forest fires charge up hill like a raging Grizzly bear igniting the tops of the trees into a crown fire, the most deadly forest fire of them all.

As a result, the ill-fated Hot Shot crew didn’t have a chance. We can only hope their deaths came quickly.

Of course, the second guessing about the Yarnell tragedy is happening already. Was the crew trained well enough? Were they truly elite? Were they depending too much on the fire-proof blanket devices they carry – a device certainly not available in my time – to bail them out of an emergency situation? Did their fire fighting plan include an emergency escape route?

But the most interesting question I came across in my research was raised in an email newsletter called the High Country News based in Paonia, Colorado which asked the question should the young crew have been sent into the scene of the fire in the first place. Elite crews like the Hot Shots, and I imagine all crews for that matter, are told that they never should put the value of anything over the value of their own lives. In the case of the Yarnell Hill fire it appears the brave young fire fighters (all under 30 except one)) were deployed because of private homes being burnt, or under threat of being burnt, in the area.

And now there are 19 fresh graves to consider. Forest fire fighters die on duty in Canada too, particularly in B.C. Surely it’s time to consider whether these deaths can be justified?

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Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and Cranbrook City Councillor. His opinions are his own.