Why I Write Here
Someone in this country has to say what they actually think.
Not what polls well. Not what the consultants recommend. Not what keeps everyone comfortable in the room where the decision gets made. What they actually think.
A fly on the wall doesn’t get invited. It doesn’t get a seat at the table or a line in the budget. It just sees what the room forgets it’s doing when it thinks nobody’s watching.
I’ve lived in Victoria for years. I’ve watched this city change. I’ve watched who benefits from those changes and who absorbs the cost. But the more I watched, the more I understood that what happens at city hall doesn’t start there. It starts down the road, at the Legislature, and on the other side of the mountains and across the prairies, in Ottawa. The same patterns repeat at every level. The same people benefit. The same people get forgotten.
The Municipal Fly is my attempt to say plainly what I see — at city hall, at the legislature, in parliament, wherever the decisions are being made that ordinary people will live with. It is an opinion newsletter. It does not pretend to be neutral. Neutrality in the face of what is happening to working British Columbians — to working Canadians — is its own position and I am not interested in taking it.
When I say ordinary people I do not just mean economically. I mean politically — the person whose instincts about how things work are dismissed as unsophisticated. Culturally — the person whose values are treated as obstacles rather than as legitimate claims on how we live together. And intellectually — the person who has never had a framework offered to them that makes honest sense of what they already know to be true. The credentialed class does not have a monopoly on serious thinking. It just acts like it does.
I write for the person who has noticed something off but cannot find the words for what exactly it is. I write for the person who has never once felt represented in any of those rooms. I write for the server, the apprentice, the woman on the late bus home who wonders why nobody at that table knows she exists.
I write for the people the system forgot.
It should go without saying — all views expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any employer, organization or group I am affiliated with.
