Recently the chairman of the North
Fibre School District No. 88 board of trustees,
Dale Fitzwilliam, had had himself elected
spokesperson for the board and the district.
One day Aldon called him at his office, a
government agency, for comment on a school
district budget item.

“Look!” Fitzwilliam said impatiently.
“This is my day job and | can't be wasting time
taking media calls all the time.”

Aldon wondered in his own mind why
Fitzwilliam had campaigned among fellow
trustees to be named spokesperson for
the board if he wasn’t available to make a
comment during business hours.

“Send me an e-mail with your question,
and I'll get to answering it when | can,” he
instructed Aldon.

Aldon did as he was told and sent an
e-mail with three questions about the district
budget. A sketchy, uninformative answer
of exactly a sentence and a half arrived by
e-mail at 4:30. Absolute deadline was 5:00.
Fitzwilliam could not be reached for answers
to follow-up questions that the editors wanted
answered or even for a more detailed
explanation of the information in the e-mail.

About a week later the district
superintendent, Rick Haeuser, invited Aldon
to cover a meeting at the district central office
auditorium between the assistant deputy
minister of education, Arthur Henderson-
Smith, who had flown up from Winnipeg,
and members of the District Parent Advisory
Council led by Horace Votuboff, a senior
officer of North Fibre Pulp Ltd. He assured
Aldon it would be OK to sit in on the meeting
and interview Henderson-Smith afterwards.

Aldon had chosen a seat towards the
back of the small auditorium. He opened his
notebook and set his take-out coffee on the
desk-like arm of the chair.

‘Aldon!’ Votuboff said sharply. “| promised the
ADM a private meeting with parents! I'll have
to ask you to leave.”

Aldon tried to explain that the district
superintendent had approved his attending
the session well in advance.

“Leave NOW!" Votuboff ordered.

Aldon was shocked. When he started
to recover from this surprise, he said at normal
voice level, “Nonsense.”

Out in the foyer the district financial secretary,
Ryan Ready, was talking with a local principal
and some of Henderson-Smith’s staff. Aldon,
beginning to boil over, said more loudly, “This
is absolute nonsense! Waste my time calling
me out to a meeting and then closing it!
Nonsense!”

“Well, Aldon, we all have frustrations in life we
have to deal with, don’t we?” Ready said.

Aldon kept walking toward the door outside
like a diplomat leaving the United Nations
general assembly in protest of a speaker’s
comments. He reached his car quickly and
drove back to the office of The News.

About two weeks later Aldon found himself
moved back onto the provincial court beat,
normally considered a rookie beat at small-
and medium-sized dailies.

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