YESTERDAY, I briefly discussed a recent trip to Vancouver, B.C. Like a similar trip discussed here last year, it was on the utterly beautiful Amtrak Cascades (if there’s a nonsexual experience as completely striking as a full-moon sunset on a trestle over Chuckanut Bay, it’s one I’ve yet to confront).
Today, some other reminiscences of what I found there:
The re-imaging of big-ass motorcycles as costly toys for corporate warriors appeared to have reached a nadir with a raffle of a C$27,000 Harley for, of all folks, the Vancouver Opera.
But the new brand-image of biking still isn’t total. Canadian news media regularly refer to a couple of organized-crime rackets, now violently battling for control of the Montreal drug-smuggling trade, as “biker gangs.” Members of one of these rackets are suspected in the recentnear-fatal shooting of a Montreal tabloid reporter who was investigating it.
(That reporter’s near-tragedy coincided with a remarkable syndicated series by another reporter, Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, detailing just why North America’s War On Drugs is destabalizing society and ruining lives far more than the drugs themselves. We’ll discuss this topic later, I promise.)
The B.C. economy still has a ways to go. It’s still heavily based on tourism, agriculture, “extractive” industries (timber, mining), and the Port of Vancouver’s shipping of Sonys and Lexuses into the rest of Canada. The province, and the country, doesn’t have the virtual infrastructure of venture capital and hi-risk speculators that’s fueled so much of the hi-tech biz Stateside. Canadian capitalists have traditionally tried to pass off chancy ventures, either to government subsidy programs or to U.S. parent companies.)
The result: You can get a house in Vancouver for maybe two-thirds of the price of a similar Seattle abode. And thanks to recent trends in the Canadian dollar, consumer goods there are no longer significantly costlier than here. Wages are stagnant.
Taxes are still higher than here. But the corporate-friendly Liberal Party is vowing to do whatever it takes to cut taxes and increase “investor confidence,” even if that includes potentially gutting a broken-but-fixable public health care system. (They appear to be a little less anxious to dismantle government subsidies to corrupt mining and oil ventures.)
Things I did:
- Stayed at a funky little hostel downtown, which for some reason was full of British groups and couples, many of them as geezer-aged as myself. Besides free coffee, shared restrooms, DIY laundry facilities, and coin-op Internet-access booths, the place offered drink tickets to a neighborhood singles’ bar. The tickets proclaimed “Backpackers’ Drinkfest,” then warned that “Proper Dress” was required. I still got in, despite having no caked mud on my pant legs.
- Had my first taste of maple taffy, a gloriously gooey concoction that could be described as especially-thick real maple syrup on a stick.
- Saw a piece of the Vancouver Fringe Festival, a more established and slicker operation than Seattle’s fringe-theater event.
- Took the SkyTrain, the quite costly light-rail system that could provide some lessons for our own fledgling Sound Transit scheme. (More about that on Monday.) SkyTrain is unquestionably popular among riders, though it’s cost taxpayers a minor mint (and they’re now building even more of it).
One reason for its popularity: It runs underground downtown but on elevated tracks along the rest of its 17-mile line, providing a more aesthetically pleasurable ride (and less neighborhood disruption) than Sound Transit’s planned subway and surface-level route. It doesn’t use monorail technology (which would let it climb Seattle-scale hills), but it’s otherwise a living proof of why the Monorail Initiative guys have a better idea than the Sound Transit bureaucrats.
MONDAY: What’s wrong with Sound Transit.
IN OTHER NEWS:Whither department stores?
ELSEWHERE:
