Tolerant Vancouver

It took the efforts of generations of free thinkers, but the city today is among the world’s most open and tolerant

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Using that old 10% calculation, there should be about 130 million gay people in China and another 110 million gay people in India. That’s nearly a quarter of a billion people, roughly the size of the entire United States, living inside intolerant, closed, and unchanging societies that make Ohio look like San Francisco.

How many of those quarter-billion people must be young, energetic, money-making trend setters and new-economy entrepreneurs chafing under rigid social rules in their home societies? Wouldn’t there be millions of them looking for a new place to live and do business that is open, tolerant, peaceful and accommodating, and yet not too foreign?

Vancouver, with its well-established Indian and Chinese cultures, is now a place where estranged Indians and Chinese nationals can find very good dahl or dim sum, and yet still get openly married to their same-sex partners, and be recognized and honoured for being gay.

By the same token, a great many of China’s and India’s young and brilliant innovators, now enjoying nearly all the trappings of affluent middleclass life, must also wish to enjoy an occasional joint. How much do they enjoy having to buy it and smoke it at great risk to their blossoming careers? How would they like to set up offices in downtown Vancouver where, atop the skyline or walking around the seawall, an ideas meeting can be openly accompanied by a shared joint, where there isn’t anyone who would notice or bother to care?

Collectively and over the course of a few generations, we the people of Vancouver have gone and created one of the most spectacularly open, tolerant, and cosmopolitan cities the world has ever seen. Maybe it happened by accident or maybe by design, but we inhabit an historical rarity in this very moment. Where else in the world right now can you be a recent immigrant and visible minority, openly gay, smoking a joint, and conducting a corporate board meeting all at the same time, and still attract no attention whatsoever?

In this light, it was noteworthy that in neither the Dyke Parade or the bigger Gay Pride Parade last week was much multiculturalism in evidence. There is work to do once we’re finished patting ourselves so hard on the back.

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