Ronald McDonald booed; Todd Bertuzzi cheered

Vancouver is a changed city. It’s actually starting to get very interesting here.

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

Where is the mind of Vancouver at, you ask? Todd (The Glum) Bertuzzi, who couldn’t smile if you tickled him with feathers, and whose thoughtless hit on Steve Moore finished short one of the widely-beloved Canucks’ best playoff shots in the team’s hapless history, was greeted with a deafening standing ovation at his first appearance back on ice at the Team Canada practice August 15 at The Garage. Later that same night, with a smile he couldn’t wipe off his face while forced to endure a stunning chorus of boos through all the lines he was paid to say, including “Vancouver, are you loving it?” and, as the boos raised the roof higher, “That sounds to me like you’re loving it!” (delivered with a bit less enthusiasm, you can well imagine) was the hapless actor playing the role of über corporate mascot Ronald MacDonald.

It is the mark of a city that has changed. This change first appeared when former mayor Phillip Owen was converted on his own personal road to Damascus in 2002, turning the formerly bland NPA mayor into an exciting activist for harm reduction civic policies and thereby waking the city up enough to elect the gruff and then-lefty former drug cop Larry Campbell as the next mayor, and sustain him at very high popularity marks even through the opening of North America’s first free drop-in heroin clinic.

The enormity of the change was further in evidence when I glanced over my shoulder last year in awe at the packed house that the low-budget, low production-value anti-business documentary The Corporation drew to The Park theatre in upscale-neighbourhood Cambie Street.

My own low-scale neighbourhood of Commercial Drive is besieged by upscale interlopers unable to afford any longer the million dollar bungalows in the frothingly bubbly west side, but not to worry, comrades. I was recognized and stopped by a couple working in their spectacular garden with $100 gloves, a Boxster in the driveway and purple paint round all the house’s window trim, and fearing the worst, I kept a distance. False alarm. Near the end of the very pleasantly outrageous conversation, the Howe Street broker was pounding his fist in the air beseeching me to continue advancing the revolution, while his manicured wife cried war whoops.

The most revealing mark of how far we’ve come, though, was apparent the night after former Reform MP, and then independent MP, Chuck Cadman, passed away from cancer. The biggest day in Cadman’s whole career came near the end of his life, when the House recently voted on a Conservative opposition-sponsored vote of non-confidence in the scandal-plagued Paul Martin-led minority Liberal government. There was good reason to believe then that, had the non-confidence motion carried, the ensuing general election might have handed Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party the reigns of at least a minority government. It would have been the crowning achievement for Harper who was present at the founding of the Reform Party in 1987. Going into the non-confidence vote, the Liberals figured on having 152 votes with the support of the Jack Layton-lead NDP, and the Conservatives figured on the support of 153 votes with the support of the Quebec separatist Bloc Quebecois. Only independent Chuck Cadman’s mind was unknown. If he voted with his old chums in the Conservative Party, the much-hated Liberal regime, propped up by the even more hated NDP who forced through a last-minute big-government budget in exchange for support, would have met its sorry fate. But Cadman chose to back the Liberals, thereby tying the vote at 153 each and throwing the tie-breaker to the government-supporting Speaker of the House.

So, on the biggest day of his political career, Cadman betrayed the 18-year-long Reform project on the eve of its final success, and joined the NDP in backing the Liberals and squelching the chance for a general election long enough for the stench of the biggest string of scandals in Canadian history to dissipate under the sweltering summer heat. You’d think he’d be crucified. Instead, he was grudgingly applauded by the Reform nutbars; and then, after he soon thereafter died, he was widely praised and his family enjoyed what was nearly a state funeral attended by the Liberal Prime Minister no less. To a caller on All-Extremist Radio CKNW, Cadman was held aloft as the example of what all politicians should be like. It turns out that there is one thing more important than allegiance to the Reform Party and its long-running project to install a blindly pro-US regime in Ottawa: an independent mind, one willing to honestly (and fairly quietly) consult with constituents.

This newspaper, which has never shied away from avowing a strong ant-Bush regime bias and has consistently maintained the most suspicious regard for all things corporate, has recently expanded its circulation into richest Canadian postal code-zone West Vancouver; it’s received well there, with more copies picked up on that side of the water than on Main Street. This change, sweeping and profound though it appears to be in all these examples, nonetheless remains invisible to virtually all sectors of the media, and it is completely unreflected in the policies and candidates of all parties involved in all levels of governance. That’s too bad, because for the first time I think in my lifetime, things appear to be changing for what I am pretty sure is the better. How can it not be good to cheer Bertuzzi and chase Ronald MacDonald from the building, to celebrate the conversion of a harm-reduction-activist mayor, to support vastly and enduringly another mayor with a sane drug strategy, to cheer a film that nails bad corporate behavior, and to celebrate the singularly powerful act of a quiet and independent representative? Something is building in this city and I like it.

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