Ever walk into a store to pick something up—say, shampoo—and been unable to locate the type of shampoo you normally get, so spend an hour looking at the wall of other options trying to decide which one to get, and not sure if you should go for one that is sulphate free or one that adds volume or one that moisturizes your hair, and when you finally decide to go for one that adds volume, you still need to decide between a dozen different types?
That’s what it’s like writing this editorial. There’s so much happening that I don’t know which thread to start pulling on to see where it leads.
Do I address the elephant in the room and talk about how the person who was arrested in Washington state was American? Because obviously an American would be so prone to violence.
Or was it because they were trans? The internet is divided on who is more violent: Americans or transsexuals. The facts point towards the former, but that doesn’t stop people from having strong opinions on the topic.
But there’s also the local elections. While I haven’t heard any official reports, there are rumours that the advance turnout was extremely high.
And while that’s encouraging, this may be a continuation of a trend that has been happening—both in municipal and provincial elections—where more and more people turn up to vote during the advance polling days to avoid the rush, and then on the day of the election itself, there is no rush, because everyone who was planning on voting voted.
In the 2024 provincial election, the most number of advance voters showed up on the first day of voting as has ever showed up.
Meanwhile, the total percent of people who voted was 58.45 percent.
While that’s up from the previous election (53.86 percent), which was held during Covid, it’s down from the 61.18 percent of the population that voted in 2017.
The highest percentage of the population that turned out to vote in the 2000s? Was in the 2001 election. The trend for advance turnout is going up, while overall voter turnout seems to be going down.
It will be interesting to see how many people decide to vote provincially; some may choose to vote simply to punish the NDP for calling a snap election; some may choose to not vote because we just voted last week in the municipal elections, and I’m sick of this and y’all can just go take a long hike off a short jetty.
And those are just a few of the things happening here in Tumbler Ridge. I frequently use this editorial to comment on things that affect a much broader swath of society, which we as Tumbler Ridgians are part of.
For instance, starting today (as I am writing this) Albertans are going to the polls to vote if they are going to stay a part of Canada.
I’ve always maintained that we are stronger together than apart. This is nothing new. A cord of three strands and all that rot.
But, like when Quebecers voted whether to stay or to go back in 1995, that’s their decision to make and I’m totally sure that nobody moved to Alberta in the last few months just to vote no to going.
Or, you know, maybe to vote yes just to be rid of them once and for all.
And let’s not forget there’s still war in Ukraine, despite it supposed to have ended within 24 hours of the current US president being elected. He’s also got the whole conflict over the Strait of Hormuz and kvetching about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts there.
But the American president is too easy and too often a political punching bag, though one could argue for valid reasons.
But I notice that I have avoided speaking his name, sorta like the dark lord in Harry Potter.
Which reminds me, I was going to expound a little more about what I said in the story about the arrest of a co-conspirator in the Tumbler Ridge shooting.
I really don’t want to write stuff that brings more attention to the shooter. We all know who that person was. The name is probably seared on our memories. So avoiding writing it is probably foolish. And I might change my mind, but working through the court filings, I was struck by how much fame or acclaim or infamy the shooter was looking for.
“The deadliest school shooting in Canada happened in 1989 and 14 people died,” the shooter wrote in a message to Bryant back in August. “So if I got over 5 that’d steal that title.”
Elsewhere, the shooter asked Bryant: “Wut do you think. Would I have fans?”
The shooter was also very concerned that the attack would be live streamed, so as to gain infamy.
There’s a theory out there, called Mass Shooting Contagion Theory. It argues that increased coverage of a mass shooting event—typically by the media—leads to an increase in copycat events.
And maybe it’s an increased sensitivity to these things, but in the last eight months, it feels like there has been an increased number of people arrested for plotting school-based attacks in Canada.
Because, while 99 people out of 100, or more likely 9,999,999 people out of ten million see what happened here and think it is the most depraved act that has ever happened, one person will see that and go “ooh, what a good idea.”
We see it in the exchanges between the shooter and Bryant, where the shooter talks about other mass casualty events and how what they’re going to do will be better. After a livestream test, the shooter brags the quality of the footage is “better quality than Christchurch and Buffalo,” two previous mass shootings that were live streamed.
The No Notoriety campaign was started by the parents of a kid who was shot during one of these events. Other campaigns—like dontnamethem.org seek to do the same thing: prevent future attacks by downplaying the actions of the perpetrator of the attack.
It’s hard, because,well, it’s news. And I’m not sure that the approach I’m taking (discuss what happened, but not the who) is the best approach, and I might update what I do as I discover new things. (It was only in researching this editorial that I came across the Don’t Name them site, for instance.) But for now, this has been the news.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
