Sean Rossiter's life celebrated by friends and admirers

Last night at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, a large crowd showed up to hear tributes to recently deceased Vancouver writer Sean Rossiter.

Among the speakers was former premier Mike Harcourt, who coauthored City Making in Paradise: Nine Decisions that Saved Vancouver with Rossiter and former Metro Vancouver senior planner Ken Cameron.

Harcourt, also a former Vancouver mayor, said that Rossiter's old "12th and Cambie" column in Vancouver magazine used to be required reading. Then he quipped about how Rossiter could interview him, write the story, and only after reading the piece a couple of times would Harcourt realize that the writer had spilled his blood all over the floor.

Vancouver's former director of planning, Ray Spaxman, spoke about how Rossiter's columns helped elevate residents' understanding of urban issues.

Judy Graves, a former City of Vancouver homeless-outreach worker, credited one of Rossiter's articles in the now-defunct Shared Vision magazine for causing senior city and provincial staff to start seriously addressing the number of people living in the streets. For that, Graves said, she'll always be grateful to him.

Writer Paul Grescoe simply read an article of Rossiter's from Beautiful B.C. about the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. It demonstrated Rossiter's talent not only as a wordsmith, but also his keen observational skills.

Former Georgia Straight editor Charles Campbell became quite emotional as he recalled what a fine gentleman Rossiter was. Another of Rossiter's former editors, Malcolm Parry, compared the former city-hall columnist to d'Artagnton in Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers.

Rossiter wrote 17 books as well as dozens of articles in the Georgia Straight on a wide range of topics.

On September 5, 1991, Rossiter penned the following Georgia Straight cover story on Harcourt six weeks before he was elected premier of B.C.:

By Sean Rossiter

Mike Harcourt should take it as a compliment when people call him a fence-sitter. New Democratic Party leaders have been called a lot worse.
When the most vicious thing his critics are saying about him after more than four years in Opposition is that he’s a fence-sitter, you have to conclude he has a limitless electoral future. It is often forgotten that he has been excelling in a job that calls for the instincts of a serial killer. To one-time NDP leader Dave Barrett, being Leader of the Opposition was the art of finishing his opponents when they were down. During Harcourt’s four years in Victoria, others may have wielded the smoking guns, but the list of dead Social Credit cabinet ministers comes to a dozen-and-a-half. Not all were suicides.

And people say Harcourt is too nice a guy. “Mikey-Milquetoast”, The Vancouver Sun called him last April. Which is not to say he likes being called bland.

“We can inundate you with plans and policies,” he says, sounding resigned to his fate, “we can commit ourselves to settling land claims and come up with a land-use and resource policy rather than the valley-by-valley civil war we’ve got now, and it seems the press will still call me a fence-sitter.

“It’s just such horseshit, it’s so lazy that it just drives me nuts. I understand it. It’s not sensational,” he says, referring to his involvement in the process of revitalizing the NDP and what he calls his “relentless” travelling around British Columbia. “It won’t sell papers....”

All Harcourt ever did was win every election he ever ran in.

He has been so ready, for so many months, to win the next B.C. election, that his transition-to-government plan has been tested already in actual combat (after Bob Rae’s unexpected win in Ontario). The NDP is finally out of its chronic debt at the same time Social Credit had to beg for hand-outs for a bare-bones convention. From his position in opposition, Harcourt has changed the face of provincial politics: the NDP is no longer committed to nationalizing B.C. Telephone and MacMillan-Bloedel. (“They’re both bad investments,” Harcourt chuckles.) Instead, he has been talking about “wealth creation” before spending. He was far ahead of the government in committing himself to settling Native land claims. The NDP has in Harcourt a leader who sounds and acts more mainstream than Social Credit’s. So the government has reduced itself to campaigning against the Ontario NDP.

These changes have been accomplished with so little fuss that you can’t blame some people for missing some of the old cartoons, like NDP leaders with fangs. After leaving all this unsaid, he makes the critical point about the view that he equivocates: “You didn’t hear that when I was mayor, did you?”

He won a few and he lost a few, but nobody ever called Harcourt neutral from 1980 to ’86. He ran a business-as-usual administration during the worst recession since the war, and was re-elected twice against cutback candidates.

He achieved the city of Vancouver’s AAA credit rating despite declining revenues. He was against Expo 86, had it shoved down his throat, and still managed to be a gracious host. He was against the high-tech, limited-capacity ALRT system, and only stopped fighting it when early test models were so quiet. He built the Cambie Street Bridge without the the bribe that the B.C. Place Corp. publicly offered to the city in return for increased density on the Expo site. He built it, also, despite the objections of all but one of his supporters on city council.

None of this is ancient history. Harcourt is fairly unique in that everything he has done since he was in his 20s has been done in public. That such a man could ever be called anything other than a relentless swimmer against the tide says a lot about how smooth an operator Mike Harcourt is after nearly 20 years in politics. You seldom see him sweat.

Over the Labour Day weekend, he took what we can only assume will be his last break before the campaign he has been awaiting for two years. The back deck of his North Pender Island cottage overlooks Navy Channel to the south from an eight-metre-high bluff that puts him a stone’s throw from the water. From his wicker chair in the unexpectedly bright sunshine of Labour Day, he watched the Saturna ferry passing between Mayne Island and North Pender. From there he could monitor the west entrance to Active Pass.

No public official I know of takes such joy from the visual feast southwestern B.C. has to offer. He has developed town houses for himself, wife Beckie, and 12-year-old Justin Harcourt on the Fairview Slopes and at the west end of Mackenzie Heights. But this cottage, halfway between his seat in Victoria and his constituency in Vancouver, must be the best vista of all. Sitting on that sunlit deck, dappled with the shade of the arbutus trees that edge the bluff in front of him, must give Harcourt the feeling that he is taking the pulse of the Georgia Strait. And, from there, the rest of B.C.

When Harcourt became mayor of Vancouver in 1980, the city was paralysed by a region-wide civic strike. The accumulation of garbage and filth in the streets had some people proudly comparing Vancouver with New York. Nothing else could be done until the immediate crisis was resolved. His agenda for B.C., which he has taken to calling his “business plan for the next four years”, has that same timed-release pain-relieving quality to it. Just getting the political agenda back to what passes for normal in B.C. is again the first priority.

“That’s something I’m trying to give, some predictability and stability. No surprises. The province needs that. What’s been blocking a lot of that wealth creation are the land-use conflicts in the forests, the growth strangulation in the urban areas, and the battles between unions and management. We’ve got to put those behind us.”

Harcourt’s first pronouncement as NDP leader was that he intended to settle Native land claims. Although the government has since committed itself to more or less the same goal, Harcourt is at least three years ahead in consulting the various aboriginal nations on a common formula. He sees the settlements as “win-win for everybody” situations that will clarify the legal status of vast tracts of resource-rich territory now in question.

The “watershed-by-watershed civil war” that began with the Carmanah Valley and erupts annually in some new wilderness area has to end, he says. In any event, he wants the detailed plans made locally by land-use bodies that would include all interested parties: company labour and management, environmentalists, and aboriginal councils.

Harcourt wants to increase employment in the forest industry by emphasizing intensive, European-style silviculture and value-added processing for logs. “Did you know,” he asks, “that the Chinese get 133 products out of the B.C. log, including perfume? We get 22.” He points out that B.C.’s number-one industry has no idea how much wood is out there; no inventory has been done for more than 20 years. Meanwhile, he promises to double the acreage of B.C.’s parks and wildlife reserves. Contrary to the fears of forest-industry executives, most of those new acres would be wetlands along the Pacific waterfowl flyway.

For the cities, Harcourt has promised to restore regional planning to address the mess that transit and growth have become on the Lower Mainland. Vancouver will finally get the ward system its residents have voted for twice.

Although he has not been specific about how to end the subjugation of B.C. cities to the whims of the legislature, Harcourt says he is sympathetic to their desires to enact such simple reforms as anti-demolition by-laws. He has promised to augment the $9 B.C. now spends to acclimatize each overseas immigrant, possibly easing the pressure on the school board’s overworked ESL programs. Vancouver General Hospital’s long-completed but empty acute care tower is an apt symbol of the chaos in health-care planning being studied by a royal commission, whose recommendations Harcourt will have to consider.

The single aspect of Harcourt’s program that has aroused the most scepticism is his promise to balance the government’s books over a four-year cycle. Said Rita Johnson: “I don’t believe it.” Again, though, it’s not as if he hasn’t done it before. Operating a pay-as-you-go system, Harcourt went to the voters to ask for a special tax increase to pay for the Cambie Street Bridge and to hire additional police for a world’s fair that he had opposed.

The longest-term feature of the Harcourt program is what he calls his Georgia Basin Concept, which calls for the unique growth challenges of our part of the world to be addressed from both sides of the border. Washington State, Harcourt notes, is far ahead of us in such diverse areas as sewage treatment, recycling, heritage building conservation, arts funding, and safety standards for tankers, and the state is working harder on managing growth. Harcourt has already met with governor Booth Gardner and Seattle mayor Norm Rice to tap into the developing expertise of such agencies as the state’s growth commission. For two jurisdictions with so much in common, B.C. and Washington State have had very little to do with each other. Most of the bright ideas, such as a super airport at Bellingham linked with Vancouver and Seattle by a magnetic-levitation bullet train, are coming from the Americans.

“And that’s it,” Harcourt says. “There is the business plan for the next four years. We don’t expect to get everything done in one term. I’ve said let’s cool it out and let’s proceed at the right pace of change. Not just the pace dictated by economics, but a comfortable pace for people. By people I mean not only voters but the public service."

Harcourt says the policy debates that an election will bring will erase any notions that he’s a fence-sitter. “We’ll have put that behind us. And, as I said, I never heard that when I was mayor. People knew exactly where I was coming from. And I intend to be the same what-you-see-is-what-you-get, open-door, proactive premier that I was as mayor.”

Interviews with Mike Harcourt are never one-sided briefings. They are exchanges of information. Harcourt is that rare politician who asks for reporters’ opinions. It shows how much gravel he sifts in search of the tiniest nuggets.

How much longer will he have to wait for an election, he asks?

After the twin disasters of a hopelessly split Socred convention and a first ministers conference at Whistler (at which B.C. continued to be the empty seat of Confederation), what has Rita J. left to lose? Social Credit will continue to call forth new and ever more original interpretations of the constitutional limits of holding on to power. The second B.C. premier of 1991 will, I predict, hang on as long as possible, hoping for a miracle.

“Yeah,” the third and future premier says, squinting southward into the bright sunlight of summer’s final weekend of glory. “An election in the snow.”