The art of forgetting

There's a reason why we reward selfless acts of public service with a commemorative statue in the park or the naming of a ship, as opposed to, say, giving the hero a nice gift certificate to Bed and Bath. It's because we wish as a community to show our gratitude by honouring and remembering them.

Last March the people of Hartley Bay went out in their fishing boats in the middle of the night and rescued 99 people off the sinking Queen of the North. Immediately popular opinion called for the replacement ferry to be named Spirit of Hartley Bay. Good idea. The people of Hartley Bay liked it.

A couple of days ago I heard the president of BC Ferries David Hahn announce on CBC that the new $51M ferry would not be called Spirit of Hartley Bay after all. We gave the people of Hartley Bay a new dock and some fire-fighting equipment instead, explained Hahn, and we're naming the new replacement ferry Northern Adventurer. It was "purely a marketing decision", he said.

I'll fucking bet it was.
It was a marketing decision to fire the BC Ferries safety inspector before letting him investigate the crash, a marketing decision to shred all documents related to the Queen of the North five days after it sank, and a marketing decision to destroy the all the crew operation manuals.

Hahn would just like this whole thing to disappear. And thanks to P3remier Gordon Campbell quasi-privatizing the corporation three years ago, he will probably get his wish. According to the Deputy Auditor General, BC Ferries is no longer answerable to government as a shareholder.while still being a risk to the taxpayer.

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera once said the fastest way to rewrite history is to change the street names - that way no one will remember what the old street names stood for.

I guess not naming them after anything in the first place is even faster.