blinkit

Economic denial in Westport and B.C.

WMD: My column from last week, musing about economic uncertainty here and in the Emerald Isle. Text follows below:

Economic chill looms heavy over Ireland, Vancouver

Warning signs ignored by many spend-crazy British Columbians

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, July 09, 2008

"You guys should stop spending money on gadgets," said my father to my brother and me last week. My brother was examining my sleek, video and wireless-enabled MP3 player.

"You're going to need your money for gasoline and food."

My father, in his 80s, doesn't understand why my brother and I are interested in sleek, video and wireless-enabled MP3 players. But he also went through the Depression, the unimaginably bleak 1930s which as far as post-millennial public collective memory goes might as well have been the 1830s. Having grown up on a farm where the family at least had food but no cash, Dad is intimately acquainted with scarcity. His warning about an impending need for thrift, a notion also long disappeared from collective memory, is part of an increasing unease in the land about our economic future. Canadians are wondering if they should be scared.

Gas has gone up dramatically, with signs home heating fuel will follow. Food is more expensive. Last week, I noticed at least two local restaurants near my office had raised prices and, I suspect, cut back on portions.

Car sales are plummeting. Transportation fees for taxis and ferries are going up. Frequent Courier contributor Michael McCarthy, our resident prophet of doom who's been writing about energy issues for years, likes to hammer home the point that this is just the beginning. It's going to get worse.

Oh joy.

I sensed similar unease while visiting Ireland last month. The Irish, a pleasant people who live on a rainy flat bog ringed by mountains and overrun with what seem like hundreds of millions of sheep, are experiencing a hangover after years of partying as the Celtic Tiger. They beat up economically just about everyone for nearly a decade and a half, building up high-tech industry by day while downing gallons of Guinness and Jameson by night. Things were so good that Ireland's traditional population loss through migration reversed itself. E.U. citizens, especially from Eastern Europe, came in droves to take service jobs the locals no longer wanted or needed, which is one reason why many of the servers in restaurants during my trip were Polish, Slovakian or Italian.

Now, the Irish told me, the party is over, and after spending a couple of nights in County Mayo pubs, I believe when the Irish finally leave a party, it really is over. A recession has emptied the kegs and reduced the construction cranes over Dublin to a fraction of their number a few years ago.

But is it a recession, and perhaps merely part of a regular economic cycle, or is it something more profound? And is anyone paying attention to the warning signs? In Westport, a tourist town of 4,000 near Ireland's west coast, the word "bustling" was the only description that fit. The place was alive with pedestrians, cars, trucks, tourist buses and cadres of German, American, and French visitors. The French perpetually smoked, the Americans filled shopping bags and the six Germans at breakfast when I entered the dining room one morning in my B&B looked at me like they'd just committed a major crime. I asked no questions.

If they'd done anything, maybe it was simply to dare enjoy themselves at a time when the economic wheel is turning. Or perhaps their denial was showing. The Irish, too, appear to be in denial. Gas is well over $2 a litre, and has always been pricier than here, but the Irish drive everywhere, and quickly, which is something considering their roads are little wider than the shoulders on the No. 1 Highway. The local newscasts and newspapers were dominated by Ireland's stinging rejection through referendum of greater integration with the E.U. But there was little official talk of economic uncertainty, whereas some of the locals I met were nervous about what lies ahead. This year, the Irish and other Europeans are still going on vacation, moved forward by past financial momentum. But next year, as jobs go, household budgets tighten and prices rise, all bets are off. The Irish might soon want those service jobs back from the immigrant Poles.

We have similar or even greater denial here. In Kelowna last weekend, where everyone is highly pleased with the expensive new bridge spanning Lake Okanagan, I was shocked by the luxurious new condo towers going up. The ambition is to create a Yaletown-like neighbourhood along the waterfront north of the city's downtown.

This is hardly the stuff of food riots. If we're headed to a peak-oil meltdown and a reduced standard of living my father would recognize from 70 years ago, no one--from Galway to Gibsons--is preparing for it.

Misspeaking in tongues

WMD: In more timely fashion, here's my latest Courier column the day it's actually published. You can catch the direct link here. As usual, I'm reproducing the text below:

A note: writing about culture, language or ethnicity in a popular format is always chancy. You run the risk of either being accused of racism or receiving altogether too enthusiastic accolades from people who are indeed racist. But either you try to describe current social reality, however breezily, or you give up and just make stuff up to attract readers. I hope I'm doing the former.

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The other week one of our reporters asked me to listen to an interview she had just taped. She had talked to a source on the phone for five minutes and barely understood anything he had said. I listened carefully. The man had an exceptionally heavy accent, and I barely understood any of it either.

Vancouver, I have no idea what you're saying anymore. We've become, within a decade, Babel on the Pacific. With a dozen different major languages in currency, and widely varying abilities at English in play, communication on our streets is becoming a tad difficult. At the risk of paraphrasing Dennis Miller, I don't want to go on a rant here, but it's also starting to suck.

Admittedly, it's one of the prices of going global. People are coming to Vancouver from all over the world, and that's fine because we have far better restaurants now.

The variety of skin tones at the beach are also quite nice. And our new global self has created the Great Vancouver Pastime, which is to guess where everyone living here is from. As it turns out, everywhere but here: The latest census figures reveal that only six people in Vancouver are actually from Vancouver. (There was a seventh, but he sold his West End studio, moved to Saskatoon and bought a neighbourhood.)

A multiplicity of languages does make for adventurous living. When I rented a few years back, one of my building's maintenance men was Russian. He was very nice and helpful, and I would talk with him occasionally, which was interesting because he sort of spoke English, and sort of did not. If he showed up at my door with a tool box, I knew he was there to fix something.

Such adventure is now on the increase. When I take a taxi, often the driver sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. I tell him where I want to go, he sort of drives me there, and I sort of get there. And then by looking at the numbers on the meter, I know how much to pay, sort of.

At a cafe near where I live, one of the servers sort of speaks English, and sort of does not. If I order coffee, she understands what I want. But if I order tea, I have to point to the actual box on the counter display so she understands what I mean.

I have the same problem when shopping. At a Canadian Tire this past summer, I was helped by a clerk with an Asian accent so thick he finally--and graciously--wrote down what he was trying to tell me. The person next in line to me also helpfully pitched in as a translator. Between the three of us, we got to the bottom of my problem, which was that Canadian Tire did not have the automotive light bulb I was looking for. Good thing it only took 15 minutes to find out.

Ask around, and you'll find people with similar tales, whether it's buying an iPod at an electronics retailer, calling up a grocery store, or ordering new flooring.

I'm sympathetic to everyone involved, whether they speak English or not, since we're all in the same rocky multilingual boat. It also makes me wish, yet again, that life was like TV or the movies. That is, when someone speaks a language I don't understand, or mauls English so completely that they might as well be speaking a rare Tibetan dialect used only by a dozen monks high up in the mountains, that subtitles would flash in front of our eyes to explain what people are saying.

I could use subtitles while at the mall. I've noticed two things about retail in an economy with a labour shortage. With so many workers going into construction or resource work, the B listers are filling the store jobs. Many of them, especially the younger ones, regard customer service as a contagious disease. Others speak English so hesitantly you're better off using sign language. Or switching to written notes, like that Canadian Tire clerk. The other alternative is for me to take my business elsewhere, and if that starts happening on a wider scale among Vancouverites, business is in trouble.

Is anyone to blame? The provincial government has cut back on ESL funding. The federal government, which sets immigration policy, largely washes its hands of settlement issues when it comes to language training. That leaves local municipalities, schools and community centres and heroic little non-profits to take up the slack, and they have more goodwill than resources.

Languages, accents, and varying ability at English do create a kind of urban music. But that's as long as everyone can follow the chorus. Increasingly, I fear, we're singing different tunes.

Support the troops? Sure, but not on police cars

WMD: My most recent Courier column, in which I question the decision of the former police chief Jamie Graham to place "Support Our Troops" stickers on police cars. Since the Courier website is in flux, and I don't know if links today will be in place a couple of months from now, I've reprinted the entire column below, which was published: Wednesday, August 15, 2007, in the Vancouver Courier.

***

When departing Police Chief Jamie Graham says placing stickers with the logo "support our troops" on city police cars is in no way political, he's suggesting he doesn't know what political is. Or he doesn't care.

Graham is a military buff who loves soldiers and tales of war. He said as much to the Courier when he first took the Vancouver Police Department's helm five years ago, and since that time he's become a Henry V among police chiefs, a loyal battalion commander who successfully shepherded his band of troops through the hell of mild civilian oversight and occasional press scrutiny.

It's no surprise that one of his last acts as chief was to supervise the distribution of the stickers on Vancouver police cars. "This is about the safe return of the men and women serving in Afghanistan," Graham said, according to the Globe and Mail.

Amen to that. But there's far more to it.

I want the safe return of our soldiers as much as anybody. And I have no problems with soldiers, guns or shooting people when it's absolutely necessary, unavoidable or even helpful in preventing a massive evil. I sometimes wish more people historically had been shot before they got up to no good: Hitler in 1933, for example, or the people who created the telephone solicitation industry. And while I'm sceptical about the commitment of the major world players to create real change in Afghanistan, leaving earnest junior partners like Canada holding the bag and taking a disproportionate number of casualties, I agree with gadfly Terry Glavin who infamously wrote in the online Tyee that if freeing and lifting up the poor of Afghanistan from religious dictatorship means shooting a few fascists, so be it.

But a gentle, honest question is required: why single out soldiers for special notice on police cars? Yes, our soldiers are doing important jobs, but so are daycare workers (who care for us when we're tiny), workers in seniors homes (who care for us when we're forgotten), and garbage collectors, who when they're not on strike, defend us from the plague. In terms of world history, and keeping cities safe, their work means more than we realize.

Soldiers don't have a monopoly on work that involves risk, physical danger and courage. In 2005 in B.C. alone, 43 loggers were killed in accidents on the job in what was a black year for the forestry industry. Total Canadian combat deaths for 2006, our bloodiest period in Afghanistan, was 36.

So why no stickers for our loggers, who are also essential to the economy?

It may be because they don't wear uniforms. Graham's stickers represent the romanticization of all things military that's crept through Canada in past years. It first appeared when we started getting sentimental about the dying out of the generation who saw us through the Second World War. The shock of 9/11, and the resulting commitment of Canadian troops to war in Afghanistan, intensified our feelings for anyone in boots.

Now military man-love has become part of the national consciousness. Think of how even peacenik Vancouver has shifted culturally. In the 1980s, city council declared Vancouver a nuclear weapons-free zone, thus frustrating the plans of the federal government of the time to put nuclear missile launchers in Mount Pleasant. (How the East Side roared at that one.) Now we're doing Tony Orlando and Dawn to public emergency vehicles.

Our adoration of the military has been more than used by the Harper government. Criticize anything about the mission in Afghanistan and you're immediately accused of not caring about the fate of the soldiers who are there. That's why the slogan "support our troops" is phrased in the imperative. It's a command, and a highly political one. It's not about supporting troops--it's about supporting the agenda of the government. That it's coming from the cops is a problem, because supporting a specific military mission, or supporting the military at all, is not a legal requirement in this country. And political statements should not be delivered by civil servants with guns.

At least one VPD member has served in Afghanistan with the reserves, and another two are scheduled to head there soon. Individually, our police should have the right to express support for their fellow officers heading overseas. But dressing up taxpayer-supplied cruisers with slogans goes too far.

How many VPD cars will bear the stickers is unknown. According to the Globe, the VPD won't reveal the number for "security reasons."

Security reasons? For stickers? That smells like politics.

When blog comes grog

Today's bLINKit: Once Monte Solberg, an MP whose initial election I covered in Medicine Hat, Alberta during the rise of Reform in the early '90s, had a real blog, which included real ideas and statements Solberg undoubtedly wrote himself. Now he's got this centrally controlled propaganda sheet, which is not worthy of being called a blog. Solberg's a decent guy and smart, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. As a cabinet minister, he has little time to tap out his thoughts at the end of the day (or at the beginning). And the Harper Tories are Kremlin-like (actually, more so) in their muzzling of party members and the control of the information flow from cabinet. But it's a shame. What was once a chronicle of regularly readable insights from a small town politician trying to navigate the byways of Ottawa on behalf of his constituents has become Tory Pravda.

Speaking of smaller towns like Medicine Hat, run from them fast and head to the nearest city. That is, unless you want a greater statistical chance of becoming a victim of crime.

Europa, Europa: SL demographics

SL Neighbourhood Update: According to demographic data for June (stupidly, I've lost the source of this information, but I found it in a past post at the excellent New World Notes), one quarter of the active avatars in SL are American. American residents also participate in SL beyond their numbers, racking up nearly 35 per cent of the total hours users spent in the world. But if anyone dominates SL, it's Europeans, who make up, by a rough count, almost half of the active residents. I've noted this before, in the increasing presence of European languages on the chat logs and Eurocentric buildings and institutions appearing on the landscape. Just across from me, an Italian avie is building what looks like an art house/gallery in the sky. It's massive, with several floors and ten times the floor space of my flying loft. And although I can see the building from my living room, I have to see anyone actually in it. The Euros are on when the North Americanos slumber.

Chief among the Europeans are Germans followed by the French and Brits. My hunch about Dutch going into SL in a big way was correct. Despite Holland having one-sixth the population of Canada, they rank one level above Canadian residents in both number of active avatars and number of hours spent in the world.

Asians are generally down the list, but NWN notes that Japan has come on strong lately, with a look and in-world culture uniquely their own.

Other updates: according to NWN, Linden Labs has declared gambling illegal in SL. That's huge.

And around my hood: the neopagan I sold my initial land to awhile back is building a castle. There's that art house project across the way. And some very ordinary, and refreshingly so, new houses have popped up. But whenever I log on, there's still seldom anyone around. It's not very neighbourly.

The pic: the flag of a united Europe flies over my hood.

Today's bLINKit: Neocons on a cruise, and how they go fascist when lounging at sea.

Happy 140 plus one

WMD: I'm officially 14 minutes late in getting around to posting about my own country's birthday. But don't worry: the card is in the mail.

Today's bLINKit: One of my favourite so essentially Canadian hobbies is to read what non-Canadians say or write about us. We're probably one of the few nations around that actually does care what people think about us ... So I was delighted to come across the Conservapedia entry for Canada. Conservapedia, calling itself the "trustworthy encyclopedia," is a right wing American response to Wikipedia, which apparently as a creation of vox populi is considered too vox populi (and therefore too "liberal." But it seems to operate on essentially the same organizational principles as Wikipedia in terms of the back and forth discussion and editing between various contributors and editors of various entries. The entry for Canada is fairly even handed. There are some errors (municipal government is not mentioned in the BNA Act, which I think would now be the Constitution), the discussion about health care exaggerates the problems faced by the system, and the obsession with the flag debate is odd (it was changed to appease socialists, among others?). But generally it's solid. And after reading the edit section, I feel for the sole Canadian who's valiantly trying to protect a fair and balanced rendering of his nation to what seems like a predominantly U.S. audience. Writes the contributor known as TrueGrit:

This page is not for comparing Canada to the United States. This is a page for reporting facts about the country. If I was so inclined, I could come up with some really nice things to say about Canada that make us look much better than the United States- but I don't. It's people that come in here and try to drag down my country that make their country look bad. Lose the attitude of superiority. This is not "An American Site". This is a wiki which is open to users around the world. If this site is to gain credibility, then it has to be balanced.

I'm with TrueGrit on that, so on this Canada Day plus 1, my hat's tipped to him/her with appreciation. (And a small note: while it might not be an "American site," its logo is essentially made up of the Stars and Stripes.)

Community spirit/Viva open software!

Today's bLINKit: My latest story, in which I visit some of the churches in my neighbourhood. Hopefully it's more interesting than it sounds. I enjoyed doing it: I got fed.

And Michael Kissinger put the members of city council on hotornot.com and recorded the results.

Finally, Cuba embraces open software. Now if they'd only open their political and economic system ...

Campbell booed, Clinton cheered

Today's bLINKit: Victoria's Monday Magazine reports that Premier Gordon Campbell got booed when he made an appearance with Bill Clinton during the latter's talk in the provincial capital. Worse than that, the mere mention of Campbell's name by the former president caused people in the crowd to boo. There were cheers, too, but ouch. The upshot politically? Drunk driving bad, interns forgiveable.

Nasty U.S. election ads; annoying dinner party

Today's bLINKit: Observers in the U.S. are calling this year's mid-term elections among the worst, if not the worst, for political attack ads and outright lying. Slate provides examples, with annotations here. I can't wait until this style of ad comes north, just as other fine, American-style politicking has.

And one of 14 Canadian military heroes who will be immortalized in statues and busts next to the National War Memorial in Ottawa includes an American Revolutionary War guy, a Loyalist obviously, who apparently was quite nasty, or at least allowed nastiness to happen on his watch. So Americans traditionally have reviled him. To be fair, nastiness was committed by both sides in that war. Just ask the Loyalists driven north, or Joseph Brandt and his people.

And more bad news for newspapers, at least in print form. Reader circulation figures for major dailies are down says the Globe and Mail. The Globe reports its numbers are not down as much as its rivals, but the source must be considered. And if numbers are down, you must wonder if it has something to do with the weekend's edition Globe Style Entertaining expose on how to run a dinner party. Not that I begrudge the dinner party hostess or her guests for being among the privileged classes -- bless them for their success and luck. But how am I supposed to pick up tips (which was the purpose of the extensive piece) about running my own little proletarian affair from a party in which the hostess did not cook or serve the dinner (it was catered) and hires a DJ to program her music and a florist to pick out the flowers? Or in which the guests chat about racking up their extensive air miles or what it's like to work in Manhattan and commute to Georgian Bay for the weekend to relax? Again, bless them all, and I don't expect them to be dressed deliberately in Wal-Mart togs or to talk about poor, poor Darfur throughtout the evening (although that would be appropriately trendy and hip for such a crowd). But who is the Globe piece written for in a so-called "national" newspaper? And why 16 pages of guieless prose and photos devoted to an experience perhaps a million or so Canadians at best could participate in? Great way to broaden your base.

iPod and angry Vancouverites

Today's bLINKit: Slate asks if the iPod changed anything after it appeared five years ago. It decides it merely continued the personal audio space revolution begun with the Sony Walkman cassette player. The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, but it was the first to carry the idea of MP3 successfully to a mass market thanks to great design and functionality. I carry around a Creative Zen V, a tiny flash player that was $50 less than the iPod Nano equivalent when I bought it a couple of months ago. (It's excellent, both for design and function. All it lacks is software equivalent to iTunes.)

The mini-daily 24 Hours, the Vancouver edition, has launched video podcasts. I've seen a few and it's a good, fun use of the form. And I'm jealous.

Finally, Brian Fawcett tries to figure out why Vancouverites are so quick to anger when confronting one another. He chalks it up to deep ethnic divisions and an increasing chasm between the wealthy and the definitely not wealthy in a city which caters exclusively to the former. (I would add lack of space, especially on the roads, as a contributing factor.) Here's what he has to say about Asian influence on what will become Canada's first Asian city:

The Asian money, which has been circulating since 1986’s Expo is a subtle toxin. After two decades it has the city bulging with an overabundance of high-end retail that couldn’t stay in business for a month without it. It’s locally fashionable to think of Vancouver as the new Asian frontier, but the reality is more grainy. The business dorks spend a lot of energy propagandizing the idea of the Pacific Rim economy, without seeming to realize that their metaphor puts the city on the far edge of an economic toilet bowl and that its reality reduces the non-Vancouver parts of British Columbia to permanent status as a resource extraction zone.

Vancouver is really Asia’s recreational resort, a respite, and the wealthiest of the city’s Asian newcomers treat it as such. Yet for better or worse, Vancouver is going to be (and very nearly is already) North America’s first Asian city. The fiscal and cultural uneasiness of its Asian immigrants is palpable, particularly the wealthy ones. They’re insular, most of them arriving not with their own ethnic depth and confidence but with Asia’s strain of globalized culture, which is a veneer of consumerism, real estate Feng Shui and plastic.

It certainly explains Richmond.