Road Warriors (from Monday Magazine, August 12-18, 1999)

    THE TIRES SHRIEK as I bank into the turn at 60 miles an hour, when just ahead I see disaster: a rusted Chevy Nova and a spray-painted Camaro, two hulking monsters right out of a claims adjuster's nightmare, fighting for the inside lane.
    The Camaro nudges into the lead, and the Nova hits him in the trunk. The Camaro skids sideways, and the Nova T-bones him — BAM! — bashing right into the Camaro driver's door, sending up a cloud of sparks and oily smoke. I swerve right, and hammer the pedal to the floor. Locked in first gear, the '76 Granada guns to 4500 RPM, and I shoot past the carnage and into the straightaway.
    I'd be laughing, if I could breathe. Though there were 21 cars at the start of the main event, the wrecks keep chopping down the numbers, and the track looks clear ahead. But I'm not concentrating now. I'm too fast into the next curve.
    My right leg slams up against a padded brace in the cockpit as I try to battle the force of the turn. I can't hold it. I wrench the wheels harder to the left, and that it puts me into a skid. I step on the gas to try to swing the tail around and I accelerate — towards the grandstand, and the leading edge of a concrete wall. And that wall is coming up fast . . . .

    EVERY SECOND SATURDAY out at Western Speedway is the most bizarre open-air spectacle you'll ever see in these parts: thousands of otherwise-demure Victorians cheering as their neighbours drive heaps of Detroit steel around and around at high speed, and try to run each other off the road.
    This is "hit-to-pass" racing, the lunatic offspring of stock car racing and demolition derbies, combining the best (or worst) elements of both. Stock cars avoid collisions; in hit-to-pass, you're required to smack the car in front of you. And unlike demolition derbies, where vehicles chug around an enclosed ring (often in reverse, to avoid bashing their radiators), hit-to-pass cars run flat out at highway speeds, guaranteeing rollovers, engine fires, spinouts, and plenty of crumpled metal. A hit-to-pass night is a Mad Max movie come to life, or a gladiator scene from the final days of the Roman Empire; at one point in the festivities the promoters even toss loaves of Bunsmaster bread to the hungry crowd. Kids love it.
    Harder to figure out is why the drivers subject themselves to such punishment. It's not the money: drivers take home a $17 plastic trophy and around $300 for winning a main event race, and only about $1,500 for winning the entire season, which winds up in October. No, the appeal is more primal than that.
    "It's the adrenalin rush," says Gerry LaBelle, president of the Lower Island Track Racing Association (LITRA), the club that runs hit-to-pass nights. "If you're not afraid before a race, if you're not nervous, there's something wrong with you. You don't know whether you're going to get hit once, or whether you're going to get hit 30 times."
    Learning how to drive intelligently, how to finesse a vehicle — even a battered old Impala — around a turn is part of the pleasure. So is the thrill of victory. LaBelle owns the Canadian College of Business and Language on Bastion Square, and in his office he has some of the 18 trophies he's won in the nine years he's been racing. Though he and his wife have four young daughters, he can't give it up. "For me, it's an addiction," he says. "After I've raced, I feel on top of the world."
    That kind of fix is easier to get than you think. Along with demo cars, demo trucks, and "mini figure-8"-slamming compacts, LITRA also has a low-contact "claimer" division, which offers a cheap way of getting into the sport. Setting up a real stock car can cost up to $10,000, but if you join LITRA and put $269 in an envelope, when it gets drawn from a hat at the end of a hit-to-pass night, you can pick any one of the claimer cars, tow it home, and drive it in the next race.
    Seeing's how I'm a bicycle-riding cheapskate who barely knows how to change his own oil, I'm hesitant to buy a claimer, and I don't think my landlady wants her lawn looking like a Tijuana scrapyard. So LaBelle puts me in touch with John Cross, a veteran claimer driver, and wise guru of automotive repair.
    There are six cars in various states of dissection on the driveway of Cross's house, just up from Portage Inlet. Coiled hoses, stacks of tires, boxes of tools, whole shelving units full of parts. "You get started with this, and soon you need everything," explains Cross, a big soft-spoken man with glasses and a monkish haircut. He drives a truck for Victoria Shipyards, but he conducts himself with the careful demeanour of a surgeon.
    The deal is that if I pay for the towing and the gas, Cross will graciously let me race his '76 Granada. He bought it out of the paper for only $150, but he's done plenty of work on it. He's stripped the car to its essentials, gutting the interior, removing the upholstery and passenger seats and the dash, reducing the starter to a steel box and a switch. He's splayed the right front wheel so that it runs upright when the car's weight's on it in a turn. He's welded the doors shut, put in required safety features like a five-point seat belt and a roll cage made of steel pipe, and bolted a strip of channel iron to the driver's door. As Cross tells me, he feels safer in this Granada than he does in his family car.
    That still doesn't explain why he races, though. And then I find out there's a side to him that's not so careful.
    "On the street we're limited to 50 or 80 kilometres an hour, and that's not really enough. The need for speed is real," he says, mischeviously. "The track is the one place where I can go out and misbehave."

    THE DRIVERS REMOVE their ball caps during the national anthem, and while I look for my girlfriend in the grandstand, a young guy standing beside me yawns, and squints into the setting sun. "I just woke up," he explains. He was sleeping on the grass over by his car. He and his wife just had a baby, and he's trying to get his 40 winks in whenever he can.
    Unlike spoiled zillionaire hockey players, Western Speedway drivers are ordinary guys (and a few gals) who live up the street. Many of them are mechanics or welders or work in body shops or wrecking yards. Another young driver I speak with, Rob Bouchard, is studying to be a Baptist minister.
    When I ask if it is unseemly for a man of the cloth to total thy neighbour's Buick, Bouchard gives me an answer that's pure Ecclesiastes. "There is no contradiction when it comes to God," he says. "There's a time when you have to be aggressive, and there's a time when you have to lay back."
    Bouchard says that after he's finished school, he'd like to start a church among the racers. Certainly, religion or not, there's a fellow feeling, a camaraderie in the pits already. Everyone's a devoted racing fan and loves tinkering with cars; they swap tools and mechanic's advice and gossip about who didn't come out to race this week and why.
    "Really, we're like family," says Adrien Thomas, LITRA's membership coordinator. That doesn't mean they always get along, though. At their pre-race meeting, the drivers are warned that they'll be docked points if they engage in unsportsmanlike conduct, like the fight that happened in the infield the previous Saturday.
    "And remember, claimers," Thomas instructs, "no intentional hitting."
The drivers look back and forth at each other and smirk, like schoolboys with plans of their own.
We head out for our timing laps. The idea on an oval like Western is to swing wide on the straight stretches, right up next to the wall, and then dive tight into the turns, making your course as circular as possible. Easier said than done. Even though I've done practice laps in the Granada earlier in the day, I overpower one turn and fishtail the back end, losing valuable time.
    I come in at 23 seconds flat. On a 4/10ths of a mile track, that puts my average speed at about 63 miles per hour. Good demo drivers can do it in 20 seconds (72 MPH average), but sometimes they'll "balloon foot" the timing lap and drive intentionally slow, to put them at the front of the starting grid in the actual races. Though I didn't intend it, that's where I'll be. On hit-to-pass nights the fastest cars start last, and have to fight their way through the pack. There's more wreckage that way.
    Back in the pits, Cross advises me to ease up heading into the turns; when you're driving in first gear, the engine is its own brake.
    Then he takes a paint marker, he writes my name above the driver's door. "That's so when the ambulance drivers come and you don't know who you are, they'll be able to tell you," Cross says.
    I look up and see a large bird, riding the thermal that's lifting off the hot asphalt. A turkey vulture. And it's circling overhead.

    LEGEND HAS IT that stock car racing grew out of Dixie moonshining, out of races that good ol' boys in hot rods had with the law. According to Tom Wolfe, in his book The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, demolition derbies got started on Long Island in 1958, but some claim they began earlier in Ohio, after a promoter saw the huge crowd that gathered at an intersection when two enraged drivers started ramming into each other.
    No one knows exactly who first put the two together and came up with hit-to-pass demo racing. Len Pease, the president of the U.S.-based National Demolition Derby Association, says in some places in the early 1970s there was an event called "roundy round", in which drivers were required to smack another car on the home stretch of each lap. He doesn't know who invented the rule that you could hit anywhere on the track.
    Some say hit-to-pass first appeared at Western Speedway when visiting drivers from Washington State came to town and showed it off in the mid-'70s. Others claim the concept was first developed right here in Victoria. Jamie Peakman, who now drives "total destruction" derbies across Canada and the U.S., says the hit-to-pass rules really evolved back when he was driving at Western around 1977. In classic total destruction, the event ends when only one vehicle is left moving. But a lot of Victoria drivers couldn't afford to lose a car every night out, says Peakman, so to save money and give their cars a fighting chance, they ran hit-to-pass laps instead.
    Whatever its origins, demolition racing remains unique to the Pacific Northwest, found only on tracks in B.C., Washington and Oregon. The publisher of the U.S.-based National Speedway Directory told me that hit-to-pass isn't anywhere else on the continent--the only place there's something like it is in Britain, where the class is called "bangers", and drivers race outrageous machines like old hearses and mail delivery vans. When I called the secretary of the Canadian Automobile Sports Club in Downsview, Ontario, to ask if they had anything similar to hit-to-pass back east, he was horrified. "We don't have any such thing here," he sniffed. "At least, not legally."
    One thing everyone agrees on, though: on the track, Victoria's drivers are meaner than junkyard dogs. "They hit very hard compared to anywhere else," says Butch Behn, who was the promoter at Western Speedway from 1983 to 1995 and now runs a track in Tenino, Washington. "That is not up for discussion, it's the truth. These guys down here, they can hit too, but not many guys want to go home without a car."
    Why would drivers from sleepy Victoria be so aggressive? Oddly enough, Behn attributes it to state-run health care. "You gotta remember, in Canada everybody's got B.C. Medical, so you just run down, the doc fixes you up, and away you go. Down here it's altogether different. You gotta have the big insurance because most people here don't have any insurance at all."
    Keith Cahill, who's won several hit-to-pass championships, says Victoria drivers hit harder mainly because everyone keeps dropping bigger and bigger engines into their cars. Twenty years ago the rule was "run what you brung"; now hardcore demo drivers will invest up to $5,000 in an engine, just to be faster than anyone else.
    Cahill certainly knows the impact those engines can have. He entered his first demo race the day after he got his driver's licence in 1979, and after that, entered any event where cars got wrecked —doing crash-dive stunts, and running total destructions twice daily for 17 days straight at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition. ("You just didn't have time to heal," says Cahill.) Now he's Western Speedway's starter and flagman, and though he holds a job at a pulp mill, he also has to rely on disability insurance and deal with constant migraines. "I'm only 36," Cahill says, "but I feel like I'm in my 70s in the morning."

    THE CARS BEHIND me in the warm-up lap weave like slalom skiers, trying to heat up their tires so they'll stick to the turns. I keep my eye on other lead car to my left and try to match his speed. When we get into the grandstand turn, he floors it.
    I try to keep up, but Cahill's waving the green start flag, and almost immediately I'm passed by two, three, four cars. In no time at all I'm at the back of the pack. There's only eight laps in a heat race, and when you fall behind it's nearly impossible to catch up.
One car overheats, another blows a tire. I manage to pass another, and end up finishing ninth out of a field of 12.
    "Nice clean racing," Cross tells me, "but you need to be more aggressive going into the turns, and much more aggressive coming out." Plug up the holes in the pack in front of you before someone else does. Hold your position, and make the others go around you. And don't be afraid to hit, or get hit back. The cars are built to take it.
    There's no Lady Byng trophy around here, that's for sure. As I wait for the main events, I walk over to the gallery to watch the heats for the demo cars, the stars of the show.
    Near as I can figure it, the fan appeal of hit-to-pass is schadenfreude without the guilt: you get to munch burgers watching one terrible car crash after another, but don't you don't have to help or worry about sleepless nights because the drivers (almost always) walk away from the scene. Whatever the reason, it draws a crowd. Sometimes there's as few as 500 people in the audience for Western Speedway's regular stock car nights; hit-to-pass routinely does four or five times that number.
    A Pontiac goes into a dusty double rollover on the berm at the back of turn three, and promoter Matt Sahlstrom runs out to the wreck — followed by an ambulance with its siren blaring — and interviews the dazed driver with a radio microphone, right on the spot. Another two cars pile into the grandstand wall; one ends up right on top of the other and has to be pulled off by a tow truck.
    "These guys are athletes, no matter what people say," Barry Goodwin, a track photographer, tells me. "You've got to be able to take the pounding."
    In that sense demo drivers are a lot like pro wrestlers, something they play up by creating larger-than-life characters for themselves. The good guy among them is "Smokin'" Joe Liberatore, who got his nickname because he used to light off smoke bombs when his orange '74 Monte Carlo was introduced at the "prettiest car" contest at the start of the evening. "It's not about just being a good driver, it's about putting on a good show," admits Liberatore, although he was skilled enough to win a demo championship in 1996. "Even if you're smashed up and really upset, you've got to be able to say hi to people and be willing to give something to the fans."
    Liberatore, who used to drive a bus full of handicapped kids for Queen Alexandra School, does a lot of charity work and fundraising by touring around with his car. In return, he's got 15 corporate sponsors, including 100.3 "The Q" FM and a sushi hut ("I go to all-you-can-eat Saturdays to build up that left-side weight," Joe chuckles). He needs the money. There are three guys in his crew, and it takes a couple of hundred dollars and 20 hours of work after each race, repairing his car.
    The ones who wear the black hats on demo nights, Liberatore's sworn enemies, are (I kid you not) the Hansen brothers, Marty "McFly" and Keith "Dr. Death" Hansen. Like their hockey-thug namesakes from the movie Slap Shot, they like to win — but almost as much, they like to hit.
    "You're always trying to chase down that next guy," says Marty, who races a '69 Grand Prix and works as a salesman for a stationery company. "Some guys you like more than others. Some guys you just try to spin 'em out and let 'em keep going, other guys you try to take 'em out for the night and bounce them down in points. That's the name of the game: try to break the other guy before he breaks you."
    The Hansens break lots of other guys, and nearly every time they pull into the pit someone has to fire up a welding torch or hoist a logging peavey (an instrument that looks like a giant can opener) to tear off their mangled quarterpanels so they can keep driving. Marty's also done plenty of damage to himself--he's dislocated his knee, busted an ankle, a shoulder, all the fingers in one hand, and his toes. "Nothing's ever made me not want to come back, though," he says. "It's part of the game. With the adrenalin, you don't feel nothin' — you feel it the next day."
    Whenever a car is knocked out of a race, drivers say it's been "killed". But car accidents really kill hundreds of people in British Columbia every year, and injure thousands more; it seems insane that anyone would go into an arena to intentionally smash into someone else. But I'm beginning to realize that's the dark thrill of driving hit-to-pass, and one that goes beyond victory, or speed. Every time you walk away, it's as if you've cheated death.

    GERRY LaBELLE WAS right: the waiting is the hardest part. I keep drumming the steering wheel as I'm sitting in a line of claimers, waiting for the 30-lap main event. Out on the straightaway the figure-8ers are squealing in loops around giant truck tires, bashing their little Hondas and Datsuns into each other like meth-crazed pizza drivers in a Domino's parking lot.
    The moon rises over the arbutus trees. I see a flickering in the stands as someone lights a cigarette, calmly regarding the mayhem. It's a strange sensation, knowing that somebody out there might be quietly hoping that you're going to eat a piece of the wall.
    We're on. Twenty-one claimers rumble out to the home stretch. The announcer calls out each of our names to the crowd, but I can't hear a thing. Then we follow the shiny new pace car around the track once, twice. The pace car peels off. We gun to racing speed, bumper to bumper, and Cahill waves the green flag.
    Although there are countless books on the psychology of winning tennis or the inner game of golf, there are precious few about driving race cars, and it's not hard to understand why. Battling your way through the chaos of a claimer race is like flying a fighter plane in a dogfight, or swimming in a feeding frenzy of sharks. You don't worry much about "finding the flow" or being "in the zone" when you're trying to keep from getting killed.
    As the man said, there's a time to lay back, and a time to be aggressive. I hold the lead out of the start this time, and going into one turn I get banged again and again by cars trying to force their way up front. Two turns later, I fishtail and slam my back end into someone taking the outside. Fighting with another car to make a turn on the inside, I cut it too short, run across the grass, crash back onto the asphalt, and sock him a good one, right in the chops.
    There are crackups and blown engines all over the track. While the caution lights flash, I lose my position in line and fall behind. Then the race picks up again, the Nova takes out the Camaro, and I overdrive the turn and nearly lose it into the grandstand wall--but when I ease up the gas like John told me, the car decelerates quickly and I shudder to a stop on the warning track, a few feet short of becoming a dummy in a crash test.
    I back out, throw the Granada into first again, and rejoin the race. It isn't pretty, but somehow I survive. Out of 21 cars, only 14 finish. I come in 10th.
    I pull into the pits, and see Cross grinning at me. "Well, did you have fun?"
    "John," I tell him, "I think I finally understand."
    I don't know whether I'll race again; I don't want to push my luck. But right now, I'm juiced. The back of my shirt is drenched with sweat, and as I walk around, I realize that all my senses are wired. I'm alive.
    John and I get a cup of coffee from the concession stand, and I swear I can taste the roasted oils of every single blessed coffee bean. The klieg lights illuminating the track are as bright as flaring magnesium. And when my girlfriend comes over and hugs me, I feel her warmth through my fire suit, and the back of her neck is as soft as velvet. I won't be able to fall asleep for hours.

The Flying Firemen

On Tuesday, August 30, 2022 at 11 am, the City of Langford will inaugurate the new Flying Firemen Park, at 1851 Bear Mountain Parkway. A version of my July 2008 article below will appear on a plaque in the park. You can read more about the park here.

There were few clear trails on the rocky southwest face of Langford’s Skirt Mountain. Craig Davidson and his sister Bonnie Stacey had to claw through alder and thick brush on the slope. It was difficult work. Especially because they were looking for the place where, 40 years earlier, their father had died.

Their dad, Alex Davidson, was a pilot. During World War II he tested Hurricanes and Spitfires, and trained Czechs to fight with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain. He went to university after the war and had a family, then ended up in Victoria, running training flights in old Harvards and test-piloting planes for Fairey Aviation, the company that converted the giant Martin Mars flying boats into waterbombers.

The sciences of forest management and fire control weren't as developed back then, and the need for fire-fighting aircraft was huge. But the Martin Mars planes belonged to the logging companies, and the B.C. Forest Service didn’t have waterbombers of its own, so in 1965 Davidson started his own outfit – The Flying Firemen – using two converted war-era PBY-5A Cansos, based at the Pat Bay airport.

The Flying Firemen were kept very busy. In 1966, Davidson bought a third Canso and recruited Robert “Paddy” Moore (photo far right), a fellow WWII ace and Fairey test pilot based in Nova Scotia, to join the company the following year. It was smart planning. In the summer of 1967 a heat wave swept across British Columbia, and fires broke out everywhere. On Sunday, July 16, at about 4:30 p.m., Davidson got an urgent call. A blaze had erupted on Skirt Mountain, near Goldstream park.

Davidson and Moore skimmed their #2 Canso along Saanich Inlet, scooping up more than 1000 gallons of water and dumping it on the flames. A crowd gathered along the Trans-Canada Highway to watch as the pilots roared back and forth between the inlet and the fire, for more than two hours. And then, on a low pass, the left wingtip struck a tree, and shattered. The crowd gasped as the plane smashed into the mountainside and exploded, killing the pilots instantly.

The tragedy was front-page news for weeks. Transport Canada determined that the probable cause was “misjudgement of altitude”, but could not say who was flying at the time. (Photos from the report are above.) Papers across the country reprinted the photograph below, of a rescue worker looking at the charred airframe.

It was probably the most shocking postwar plane crash in Greater Victoria’s history. And yet, 40 years later, it seemed to have been publicly forgotten. (I note that it didn't even qualify for the "This Day in History" feature in the Times Colonist.) I wondered: Was there any trace of it left? So last summer, as the anniversary of the accident approached, I contacted Alex Davidson’s children, Craig and Bonnie, and we went to see what remained.

Les Bjola, one of the developers of the Bear Mountain golf resort atop the peak, told me he’d seen the wreck. Even with his directions, we spent three hours combing the craggy, overgrown slope, until Craig called out, “It’s here! There’s debris all over the hill!”

A landing-gear strut lay tangled in the bush. One of the rusted engines sat in a clearing; someone had tried to remove it, even though tampering with an old plane wreck is prohibited by the province's Heritage Conservation Act. Bonnie and I found Craig standing beside a chunk of the fuselage. He was quiet.

Craig was only 16 when his father died. He was in a car near Calgary, when he heard on the radio that a waterbomber had crashed in Victoria. “I hoped it wasn’t him, but I had a feeling it was. I knew all the guys; it was my summer job, helping the mechanics, gassing the planes up, polishing windshields. So I knew it was bad news.”

His dad’s partner kept the business going, and Craig worked for the Flying Firemen the next year. But on August 8, 1968, another one of their Cansos crashed in the Sooke Hills near Jarvis Lake, killing pilot Tommy Swanson and engineer Tom Worley. “When we lost the next plane, I’d had enough.” Craig became a commercial fisherman.

His father’s vision survived, though. In 1969, a former Alaskan named R.L. “Bud” Rude bought The Flying Firemen; he got in trouble with the tax department, and sold the company to Alex Wood, who grew it into the largest amphibious waterbombing outfit in the world. (The company ceased business in 1996, a victim of competition from federally-subsidized CL 215 waterbombers built by Quebec-based Canadair.) Cansos are still in use today, and you can actually fly in one at a warplane heritage museum in Ontario.

There’s still no memorial for the Flying Firemen. Development plans for Bear Mountain do include streets named Alexander Davidson Crescent and Paddy Moore Place, high atop the peak where the pilots died. But perhaps the best tribute to who they were rests in the thoughts of their families.

Paddy Moore’s widow Kathleen lives near Beacon Hill Park. She told me they met when they were teenagers in northern Ireland, and he was a trainee pilot; her father often shouted when Paddy flew low over their house, trying to impress her. He later won a Distinguished Service Cross for “gallantry, skill and devotion” while fighting in the Pacific.

They had only been in B.C. for two weeks when Paddy died. Sidney, where they lived, was just a village then. “I could write a book about the kindness of the people of Sidney,” she said. Her neighbours brought her cakes and the mail, and the local tailor fitted her three sons with suits for the funeral. Test pilots came from as far away as England and Africa for the service. “A bond was formed between those men,” she explained.

What they likely shared was the joy of flying, the thrill of pushing an aircraft's limits – and the knowledge of their own fragility.

“I felt sad when I saw the wreckage,” Alex Davidson’s daughter Bonnie told me. “My dad was 43. I’m nearly 60, and my children are in their 30s, nearly the age he was when he died. I thought of how much life they have left, and it was sad. He never saw his kids grow into adults, or his grandchildren.”

UPDATE (March 16, 2009): As of today, the Skirt Mountain crash site is now included in the B.C. Archeology Branch’s database of protected heritage sites.

UPDATE (November 19, 2009): Elwood White, author of Wings Across The Water: Victoria’s Aviation Heritage, is researching a book about The Flying Firemen. Last month, he attended a reunion in Sidney of the former pilots and crew members – who also reminisce about the company in an online forum.

UPDATE (July 16, 2017): Today is the 50th anniversary of this historic tragedy. Recently I was told by someone living in the area that visitors have been removing pieces of the wreck, so I have removed any references to its exact location. 

The Referendum Question

This post is nearly 10 years old, but it still seems relevant, given that the City of Victoria and District of Saanich will likely ask their voters a question on amalgamation in the autumn of 2018, and Victoria will probably hold a referendum on borrowing money to replace Crystal Pool. Enjoy! RC
 

[October 2008:] My absentee ballot for the U.S. election recently arrived in the mail from Seattle. I’m a dual citizen, and with little surprise to anyone, I’m voting for Barack Obama.

What is a surprise are all the other questions on the ballot. Along with elections for state positions from governor to commissioner of public lands, and several judges, I’m supposed to vote on eight different amendments to the King County charter. I’m asked to consider a sales-tax increase to expand Seattle’s rapid transit, and a property-tax levy to upgrade Pike Place Market. There are three citizen-initiated propositions too – including a law permitting assisted suicide.

Quite a contrast to elections on this side of the border, where we do little more than mark an X beside a name, then go home and sulk for another four years.

Political scientists say this difference exists because Canadians retain the British tendency to defer to the Crown, whereas revolutionary Americans make a point of leaving decisions to We The People. But as I noted last month, democracy in Victoria 50 or 100 years ago was far more American in practice, especially in municipal elections. Victorians went to the polls every year to elect their councillors (and police commissioner) until 1973, and the ballot nearly always included one or more referendum questions, asking for voter authorization on everything from construction of the Johnston Street bridge (approved in 1920) to Sunday shopping (1981).

Consider the variety of referenda held in our region’s four core municipalities, over the space of a decade:

1956: Voters in Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt and Oak Bay turn down a $5.6-million region-wide school construction program. Saanich residents vote in favour of refinancing their waterworks, and building another library. Oak Bay voters approve construction of a new municipal hall, and ban the sale of raw milk.
1957: Victorians approve a new library agreement with surrounding municipalities.
1958: Victorians vote 3,992 to 1,994 in favour of amalgamation with Saanich, but Saanich residents are two-to-one against it, 5,090 votes to 2,731. Victorians also approve construction of the View Street parkade, and downtown pedestrian malls.
1959: Although dentists call for fluoride to be added to city water, Victorians vote against it 6,833 to 4,031. A week later, Saanich, Esquimalt and Oak Bay residents also refuse fluoridation.
1961: Saanich voters approve sale of beer by the glass.
1962: Victorians approve spending $950,000 to create Centennial Square, including renovations of the Pantages Theatre (now the Macpherson Playhouse). Saanich residents refuse amalgamation again, but with only 55% opposed.
1963: Victorians approve a $375,000 renovation of the Fisgard Street police station.
1964: Esquimalt residents vote to amalgamate the “panhandle” region of View Royal into their municipality.
1965: Voters in five out of seven municipalities reject creation of a regional hospital authority, limiting the power of the new Capital Regional District.

(A detailed timeline of all the referendums held in Greater Victoria over the past century can be downloaded HERE.)

Since then, the capital has been returning to its deferential British roots. Victoria last went to its voters in 2002 to approve the deal for the Save-On Foods Memorial Centre, Esquimalt in 2003 for sewers, and Saanich and Oak Bay in 1999 for the $10 CRD parks levy. This election year, none of the four are asking referendum questions.

Westshore municipalities, on the other hand, are keen on direct democracy. This November 15, Sooke is asking residents whether they want to create an endowment for their regional museum. Metchosin's asking whether it should push ahead with plans to extend its boundaries. Colwood and Langford are asking residents whether they want the B.C. government to upgrade the E&N railway. A positive result in that referendum won’t legally bind Campbell’s Liberals, but it will send a message – in advance of next spring’s provincial election – that voters want action on rail transit.

“Often it’s a political decision: ‘Let’s ask our citizens’,” says Rob Buchan, Langford’s clerk-administrator, explaining Langford’s use of referenda. “A question builds interest, and we’re very active in terms of community-building.” (Notably, Langford didn’t ask voters whether they wanted the controversial Spencer Road interchange.) Besides, all municipalities use voting machines, so the cost of adding a question to the ballot is negligible. “People are coming out to vote anyway.”

Councils certainly have reason to be afraid of giving the public the last word. Why spend months planning a project if it can be nixed by cranky, lazy voters? In 2001, Westshore municipalities asked to borrow $8.5 million for water system upgrades, but the residents refused – and less than 10% of those eligible bothered to vote. Cities are also more complex than they were a century ago. Councillors oversee development planning, transit, parks and rec facilities, policing, sewage, water, and many other concerns. How could an ordinary citizen know enough about such operations to intelligently vote on them?

But that’s the cynical view. “People want to be asked. Then they’ll do the work,” says Sher Morgan, chair of the Saanich Civic League, a voters’ group that sprang up in response to the abysmal 19% turnout in Saanich’s 2005 election. Morgan did 300 door-to-door surveys of her district, and she repeatedly heard that people wanted to be more involved in municipal affairs, but didn’t know how. “Referenda are a great form of inclusion. They get people thinking,” she says. “And they might make us more respective of what councillors do.”

Most importantly, referenda might actually help the councils themselves. All too often, our councillors seem only to react to announcements or court decisions, allowing the evolution of Victoria to be dictated by developers, interest groups, city staff, or other levels of government. Many of the historic votes described above, by contrast, required politicians to draw up their own strategic plans and present them to the voters. If municipal councils started declaring their priorities – and backing them up with votes of public confidence – they might actually regain some authority.

Would you agree to a $20-per-household annual levy across the CRD to build affordable housing? Do you support a ban on non-biodegradable plastic bags and takeout food containers? Should Victoria create a network of bicycle-only streets? Considering the dire state of our oceans, would you agree to a ban on the local fishing and commercial sale of salmon? Do you approve rewriting the Beacon Hill Park trust to permit commercial events? Are you in favour of: A) amalgamating all of greater Victoria into one municipality; B) amalgamating the current municipalities into three bodies (Westshore, Victoria, Saanich Peninsula) or; C) the status quo of 13 separate civic governments plus the CRD?

Lord knows, some questions need asking.

UPDATE (November 13, 2008): A nice article by Jack Knox in the Times Colonist today about referendums and this blog. (Thanks for the hits, Jack!) If you want to pursue the debate further, there's a discussion about referendum questions on the Vibrant Victoria forum, starting here.

UPDATE (November 25, 2008): Maclean's magazine has an article about ballot initiatives in the United States. Most interesting is this bit:

Ballot initiatives got their start in the U.S. in the late 1880s in mostly western and some southern rural states, often driven by farmers wanting to wrestle some power away from state legislators they considered to be dominated by railroad interests, according to Smith. The first state to allow ballot initiatives was South Dakota in 1898, but the first state to actually use the process was Oregon in 1904.

Seems direct democracy has a strong pedigree in the Pacific Northwest. Read more here.