"If you're ready to be blown away by how crooked, arrogant and contemptuous government organizations and representatives in British Columbia have acted in recent history, you'll want to follow this story," Scott McWalter posted on his Facebook feed in January, tagging both John Brink and The Brink Group of Companies in his comments.
Big accusations of illegal activity. Nobody named and no specifics, of course. Just a blanket tarring of MLAs and provincial government bureaucrats, working in cahoots.
Then, on Tuesday, another Facebook post by the Brink Group, urging everyone to come out to the courthouse Wednesday morning to "find out more" about Brink's battle with BCR Properties over a "toxic landfill."
So what was the big news?
Brink is not running in the upcoming provincial election. Big deal.
As for that toxic landfill, Citizen readers first heard about that more than four years ago, when Brink launched a lawsuit against BCR in February 2013, alleging the Crown corporation didn't provide him with what it knew about the environmental state of their Boundary Road property before he bought it.
Various hearings on various legal issues have been heard on the matter since then but there is nothing new to the core allegations.
The court, not Brink or McWalter or their Facebook fans, will decide if there is any truth to the claims.
Meanwhile, those two Facebook posts have since been taken down, as have all of those negative comments made after McWalter put the Brink post on the Hell Yeah PG page, urging the page's followers to share it for the chance to win a shopping mall gift certificate. According to David Mothus, he and his fellow HYPG administrators disagreed with the post because McWalter works for Brink and because the page, since its inception in 2014, has been about celebrating all that's good about Prince George and staying clear of anything negative.
McWalter replied to their protest by removing all of them as administrators.
After the post went up, HYPG users quickly shared the post, as they have always done in the hopes of winning free stuff.
McWalter's dad, David, chimed in that "this law suit (sic) is going to make the BC Liberal government look really, really bad... just in time for the 2017 provincial election."
Within minutes, however, longtime HYPG supporters began questioning why it was there. When they found their comments deleted and their access to the HYPG page blocked, they reached out to their Facebook friends in outrage.
Then, for what seemed like forever but was actually only a couple of hours, McWalter stopped policing the page so the anger against him was posted for all to see on the HYPG page.
It quickly moved from fair comment and criticism to name calling, personal attacks and even physical threats. It was the mob at its worst, engaging in the public shaming of a local citizen with reckless abandon.
Mercifully, McWalter put an end to all of it at 9:36 p.m. Tuesday, posting "Thanks for the memories, Prince George." There have been more than 300 comments made on that farewell but no new posts since.
McWalter wasn't at the courthouse Wednesday nor did he return phone messages from The Citizen asking for an interview.
Brink can make his case before the law courts, as is his right as a citizen and a business owner. A judge will use the law and legal precedent to decide whether his claims have any merit.
As for McWalter, however, the court of public opinion, in the form of the more than 35,000 HYPG followers, raised him up and then tore him down. Their verdict is final.
It was telling that more than a few HYPG followers had no idea who McWalter even is or why he had shut the page down.
In other words, they didn't care about him at all, they just wanted to be part of something positive. They took pride in the support given to various local projects and individuals making a difference. They felt part of a community that worked to make the city better.
Most importantly, they took ownership of HYPG. That's how successful community engagement works, of course. The result is residents who say that's my newspaper, that's my college, that's my university, those are my junior hockey teams and that's my Facebook page.
Shutting HYPG down is McWalter's right as the page's founder but if he didn't like the direction it was heading, he could have handed the keys over and walked away, letting others decide what HYPG should be.
The fact he didn't and his now uncharacteristic silence about the whole thing speaks volumes that Hell Yeah PG was really just Hell Yeah Scott McWalter all along.
Thousands of residents bought into McWalter's vision of community boosting. That vision has enduring value and will surely outlast the man trying to shut it down with the click of a mouse.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
