Council Should Let Dust Settle: One Man's Opinion

By Ben Meisner

  
It may be a brand new year ,but if I were Mayor Colin Kinsley, I wouldn’t be checking my mail box every hour in the hope that Jay Hill MP sending a note saying  he  will be dropping whatever he has been doing in order to head to PG and stop by the Mayor’s desk this week.

The Mayor is either dreaming  or has bewen watching too much Harry Potter, if he thinks he didn't do some damage with his not so well thought out remarks before the media in the lower mainland in which he criticized the feds for not coming to the table with some beetle money for residents who have dead trees in their yard.

If , as the Mayor now says, he and the Mayors' of Kamloops and Kelowna were not criticizing the Feds on the matter, he should have someone rewind the tape and play it back for him.

Will this hurt the association between the Feds and the City of Prince George?  Of course it will.

Jay Hill and Dick Harris have both been saying that there never was a request for federal funding forthe removal of trees from private property hit by the beetle, well at least not until  the TV cameras got rolling.

Now suddenly we have the City Council as a whole wading into the mess by sending off a letter asking that the two MP’s come before them.

If they would take any advice it would be to let a bit of dust settle on the issue before telling them they have to appear before the local Council.

At last reading as I recall, the City Council doesn’t have the power to order anyone to appear before it.  Although Council is saying it is only an invite, what will they talk to the two MP’s about?  Maybe they will chat about the weather and  the strong start to the winter here, or maybe just maybe will they try and bring the conversation around to the beetle issue?

Very often when you put your foot in your mouth (and we all have done it) you simply leave it there for awhile , chew on it and then come to the realization that you were wrong . This matter is not playing out that way.

I’m Meisner and that’s one man’s opinion.  

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