A curious headline in the Omineca Herald on February 25, 1931, said that, “Dr. Wrinch is Opposed to Good Roads in the North.” The article reported that Horace Wrinch, MLA for the Skeena riding, speaking in the House, had said that, although the proposed road to Alaska would start in his own constituency, provincial interests had to be protected from expenditure on a road that might not be affordable. It was, after all, an American project to link Alaska to the rest of the country by road. He asked the government not to commit the province too far at this stage. The Herald reported him as saying that roads in the North should be long and narrow rather than short and wide. The Herald was not impressed. To advocate long, narrow roads rather than straight, wide roads, it said, would take the roads in the North back to the days of tracks for mule trains. The paper wrote,
“It is not like the doctor to be old-fashioned. In the method of transportation he is not old-fashioned, for does he not drive one of the biggest and fastest cars in the North? A narrow road would not be convenient for him any more than it would be convenient for any one of us. . . . As a road builder Dr. Wrinch cannot be recognized as an unqualified success. It is not his line at all. He is a good doctor and a good politician, in fact there are few better. . . . We would prefer to believe, however, that he has been misreported.”
Indeed he had. Duff Pattullo, a leader of the Opposition in the Legislature and later the Premier, soon made this clear in an interview with the Herald. Horace, he said, had made no such comment in the House. This interview gave rise to the comprehensive headline that said, “If The Tories Did it, it is Wrong Says Mr. Pattullo. Everything is All Wrong.” Pattullo was, the Herald remarked, perhaps not in the best of moods, because it also quoted him as saying, “Not only is the Tolmie government the wicked the province has ever had, but it is weak. It is extravagant. It is secretive. It is ignorant and insolent. It is imbecile.” And, the Herald continued, “if there is anything else that the Leader of the Opposition forgot, the Tolmie government is that too.”