Rafe Mair is finally out of words.

Think of the limitless loquacity he deployed as a municipal councillor, in public fights large and small as a B.C. cabinet minister, in innumerable columns and books (one a best-seller) and through twenty-five years on the radio. All those words. Now, silence.

So why isn’t there a tear caged behind my lashes? Why am I smiling?

For one thing, Rafe himself (at least as I came to know him) would be the first person to laugh at the dolorous, hyperbolic and largely disingenuous praise that has been heaped on him since he entered the Wider Life.

There is no phonier tribute than the oleaginous obit. Out come the pastel chalks, the airbrush and the sentimental slop bucket. The truth, meanwhile, decamps at a gallop. As John Lennon put it, people may not love you when you’re old and grey, down and out, or on Cloud Nine. But “everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.”

While still on earth, Rafe was used to a very different kind of commentary — the accusation that he was an opinionated egomaniac who sucked the air out of every room he entered. Anyone who has ever worked in talk radio knows exactly what I mean. You can’t expose yourself every day on every subject, year in, year out, without familiarity breeding the usual contempt.

In Rafe’s case, that self-exposure was life-long — as a lawyer, a politician, a journalist and author. This was a man who coated himself in all the dust the public arena threw at him — and came back for more.

Yet the real man, the one behind the wordstruck prodigy, was largely unknown. I know a little about that Rafe. He called me, for example, when he was looking for a publisher for his last book.

For all the trumpeting in the mainstream media of Rafe’s status as a “giant” of broadcasting, the truth was that, after eleven books, he was calling around to see if anyone knew of a publisher who might be interested in him. He knew his time was running out and told me so. He wanted to see that book in print before the big sea change. The culture and media industries in Canada are that pathetic.

Still, these tawdry matters never got Rafe down. Nothing much did. He was always too ready to laugh — frequently at himself.

Funny story from his lips to my ears: Rafe lived in a multi-story condo. One day, he was navigating the stairs to the upper story with a glass of wine in each hand — one for himself, the other for his love. He lost his balance and fell backwards down the stairs.

After his recovery, he promptly did it again (he was laughing as he told me this story). Others might point to two falls in a row as signs of poor judgement and frailty. I saw it as proof positive that what we had here was a true romantic — an octogenarian Romeo carrying Chardonnay to his beauty on the balcony.

Unlike the studio creatures of contemporary broadcasting — with those interminable panels so boring they could put a charging rhino to sleep at fifty yards — Rafe was a guy who fearlessly walked the walk. Unlike the studio creatures of contemporary broadcasting — with those interminable panels so boring they could put a charging rhino to sleep at fifty yards — Rafe was a guy who fearlessly walked the walk.

Humour was, in many ways, the best aspect of his private side — but words were Rafe’s sword, shield and helmet. He played the English language like a violin, especially when it came to the delightful vulgarity of the words you hear in those neighbourhoods where the streetlights don’t work. There was a bit of Brendan Behan in the bard of British Columbia — the acid irreverence of an original.

Here’s Rafe addressing himself to Justin Trudeau’s puff-pastry defense of his Kinder Morgan pipeline decision: “… It has 2X the square root of bugger-all to do with the national economy — AND EVEN LESS TO DO WITH NATIONAL UNITY.”

Rafe was a capital-letters kind of guy. Even into his 80s, he took a pin to any political gasbag in sight, and he did it in a most public way. Unlike a lot of radio hosts who unctuously carry water for their political masters, Rafe was as far from the crass propagandist as you could get. He took dead aim at political leaders of any stripe who were abusing power, the people, or both — or at least he did when he thought they were.

It must have been interesting times in the PMO when Justin Trudeau began receiving open letters from Rafe, like the one he sent to the PM on what would be the last New Year’s Eve of Mair’s life on December 31, 2016.

In that missive, he schooled Trudeau on the real British Columbia, not the one the PM often pretends he “understands.” And Rafe did it in his trademark fashion. The log of the young prime minister’s blarney met the wood-splitter of the old man’s knowledge.

From the abomination of Atlantic salmon fish farms in British Columbia (which DFO actively supports) to the grotesque roll of the dice on Kinder Morgan and LNG, Mair got in the prime minister’s face with withering brio.

“This nonsense that bringing 400+ tankers laden with bitumen, plus many more with LNG, is of little or no consequence is, frankly, pure barnyard droppings. The constant statement by the industry that accidents are extremely unlikely, or if they do happen, they will be quickly cleaned up, is typical corporate bullshit from Kinder Morgan, and the people of British Columbia know it and will fight it desperately.”

Rafe believed that Trudeau’s tar-ships inevitably would come to grief — at Race Rocks, South Pender Island, the Salish Sea, Howe Sound, or some other treasure spot on this fabulous coast. So his advice to the prime minister was to check out Enbridge’s spill in the Kalamazoo River in 2010 and do some legacy thinking.

“Will Canada be a better place if, by force, you compel the Province of British Columbia to facilitate the full exploitation of the Tar Sands of Alberta, the acknowledged worst polluter in the world, make the wealthy wealthier, save the political bacon of Premier Notley, and give your party lots of Alberta seats?”

Unlike the studio creatures of contemporary broadcasting — with those interminable panels so boring they could put a charging rhino to sleep at fifty yards — Rafe was a guy who fearlessly walked the walk.

His words were a call to action — not empty ego-liberation dancing with sophistry. Rafe gave it out in plain English. When governments fall into the hands of authoritarians employed by elites, ordinary citizens had to take action in the form of civil disobedience — to protect Mother Earth, or their own democracy.

“Doing nothing gives in to smiling tyranny, but no less tyranny for that.”

If you’re looking for traces of Rafe Mair, I’d try Burnaby Mountain.

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