Ahhh gossip, the life-line of small communities.
This week rumours spread like the pine beetle over the sale of hometown hockey team, the Quesnel Millionaires.
And like any good rumour, it’s proven hard to squash.
But it doesn’t help matters when team owners and BCHL directors don’t return calls.
Which begs the question: Why?
Why, if the sale and departure of our long-standing team aren’t true, why not simply say that?
It happens often to journalists, someone offers a “tip,” the intrepid reporter’s “spidey” sense tingle and before they know it they’ve spent far too long on a story that wasn’t there in the first place.
It’s annoying, but it comes with the territory.
However repeated, unanswered calls to owners and the BCHL, sources refusing to go on record and city officials giving the old “I have no idea” answer point to the legitimacy of this particular “tip.”
But it’s also not fair.
This community deserves the chance to at least fight to keep their team, if in fact, it is on the brink of changing hands and relocating.
It’s not a huge shocker the team would move: the ice isn’t regulation size, fans are hard to come by, the team struggles just to make the playoffs, money is in an issue and the arena is… to be blunt, a dump.
Which, of course, brings us to the long-suffering Multi-Centre issue. How is this community supposed to secure funding for a much-needed arena if we don’t have the capacity to fill it?
Again, the community deserves the opportunity to at least have its say in what could make or break government’s decision to fund the facility.
Not to mention fight for a team richly ingrained in the history of the Gold Pan City.
–Autumn MacDonald, Observer
