Vaughn Palmer: Seattle columnist was a fan, and sometimes a critic, of B.C.

Joel Connelly in 1975 at a convention of the Washington State Young Democrats shortly before he was hired as reporter and later columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Photo by Courtesy of Gregory Nickels.

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VICTORIA — Journalist Joel Connelly was in his second year with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper when he travelled to Victoria to interview Dave Barrett, then in his second year as NDP premier of B.C.

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Barrett had been instrumental in driving up the price of B.C. natural gas delivered to the U.S. in the middle of the 1974 Arab oil embargo.

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Washington state’s two powerful senators, Henry Jackson and Warren Magnuson, were pressuring the U.S. State Department to get Canada to back off and lower the price.

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Connelly, who died this week aged 78, would recount what happened next many times in the years ahead.

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Barrett initially gave a straightforward explanation for charging the world price for the province’s natural gas resource. But when asked if he had any reply to the two senators, the populist premier went over the top.

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“Barrett delivered a Bronx cheer and raised the middle fingers of both hands,” as Connelly put it in a 2018 obituary on the former premier.

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Up yours? Politicians didn’t talk that way in those days, leastways not publicly and on the record. The P-I reported the premier’s wet raspberry sound as “Pffttt” and his four-finger salute to the two senators as “a gesture of defiance.”

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Connelly would visit B.C. many times after that. Once the Barrett story ran on the front page in the Seattle paper, he never had difficulty persuading his editors that B.C. would be a good story.

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I remember scrambling through the B.C. legislature during the chaos that was the latter stage of the Bill Vander Zalm administration and there was Joel, scrambling alongside me.

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He was a lively, subversive presence.

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Global TV’s Keith Baldrey recalls attending one of the anti-Asia-Pacific demonstrations alongside Connelly.

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“Are you guys reporters?” asked one of the protesters. “No, we’re with the Trilateral Commission,” replied Connelly, making a deft joke of one of the dearest suspicions of the paranoid left.

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He once reported Shirley Barrett, Dave’s wife, as saying that America was the loser from all those Vietnam War resisters crossing into Canada. “Was she a communist?” asked one of Connelly’s correspondents. “No, an Anglican,” Joel replied.

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More recently, the Bellingham-born Connelly wrote about the small part he’d played in the underground railroad that delivered U.S. military deserters to safety in Canada during the Vietnam War.

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Connelly, a resolute hiker and camper, wrote a lot about the natural beauty of British Columbia. He also wrote unsparingly about our province’s harvesting of old growth, the pollution of rivers, the destruction of habitat and species.

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One of his most persistent wake-up calls was aimed at Victoria for its failure to treat its sewage.
“The B.C. capital believes in using an international waterway as its toilet,” as Connelly first put it more than 30 years ago and he never let up until it stopped.