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Vancouver Secedes! The Saga Wraps up

Revisiting one smart alecky guess at Vancouver's future first published in 1997. What came true?

David Beers 22 Aug 2014TheTyee.ca

David Beers is editor of The Tyee. He wrote this piece of speculative satire for the Oct. 1997 issue of Vancouver Magazine, guest edited by Douglas Coupland. Other people who lent ideas to the article included Jim Sutherland, Lance Berelowitz and James Glave.

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Mick Singh Parson: He rescued a baby and helped launch a revolution. Photo from original story as it ran in Vancouver Magazine in 1997.

Author's note: Yesterday's first instalment is here. This is the second half of a story written as part of the October 1997 edition of Vancouver magazine guest edited by Douglas Coupland, the prolific author of Generation X and conceptual artist whose major exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery runs until Sept. 1.

The theme, 17 years ago, of Coupland's magazine issue: "Vancouver Secedes: You read it here first."

That idea had for some weeks been kicked around in the Sylvia Hotel bar by Coupland and friends including yours truly. So Coupland assigned me to write a speculative leap into the far distant future of 2012 looking back at how Vancouver had become a city state unto itself. I decided to pen an imaginary letter to a daughter from an unlikely civic hero named Mick Singh Parson. Coupland edited the piece and illustrated it with photo-shopped images of Vancouver to come.

The Tyee re-publishes the original article in two parts starting yesterday because... hey, it's summer and why not? And also as an invitation: What did this send up of Vancouver's foibles get right and miss clean? And if you may have sighted the mysterious Mick Singh Parson lately, please tell us what he's up to in the comments section.

Mick Singh Parson's letter to his daughter continues...

A mere month before the referendum to decide whether Vancouver would secede from Canada and become a privately funded city state, polls showed the yes vote 10 points behind. What was needed was some catalyst to dramatize the issues at stake.

There came several catalysts. First was the announcement of the engagement of England's newly crowned King William to North Vancouver World Cup ski racer Tracy Henson. William and his staff rented the top five floors of a quake-safe Coal Harbour condominium tower now renamed Buckingham Pacific. The wedding was slated for March 21, 2002, and Vancouver was alive with excitement and reconstruction and images of itself in a new and compelling future.

The second catalyst arrived in the form of the reconstituted Canadian Airborne Division, quartered in makeshift barracks on the tumbled-down quay of Granville Island. Ever since they'd arrived, there had been complaints about their drinking, their random gunfire in the night, some strange game they played with searchlights on the water. The gruesome reality was revealed on Jan. 17, as the morning sun burned the mist off English Bay to reveal a listless Bjossa waiting patiently for her breakfast of Bishop's leftover rare tuna with hazelnut-scallion crème fraîche. To the horror of her feeder -- on that day none other than John Bishop himself -- Bjossa's fin was cleanly pierced by a Toonie-sized bullet hole. The Airborne had for weeks been using the whales for their betting games of target practice. The night before, somebody had won.

As word got out, thousands of incensed citizens joined the band of Granville resisters. Their swelled numbers easily routed the Airborne, who made a new encampment within the well-fortified City Gate complex and wired to Ottawa for reinforcements. The resisters, meanwhile, claimed Granville Island "for the people of Vancouver," no longer federal property. That night the tanned and lithe prime minister appeared on the CBC looking sombre, in flat-front chinos and a Gap pocket-T. "Canada shall not be held hostage by hemp-heads," he said. To underscore the point, he ordered a warship sent from Esquimalt, the new HMCS Mulroney.

I wish I could say I was early to lead the fight on Granville Island, eager to become the guerrilla warrior I am sometimes made out to be. The truth is I went to Granville Island that day because I had met the young cashier I rescued from the octopi during the Boxing Day Quake. I was at a veggie-grill cookout two days before, and just as I arrived I saw her drive away in a clapped-out Aerostar van. Her lean, strong legs and freckled shoulders were unmistakable. Her friend in the passenger seat said something, and her laugh went off like a miswired car alarm. I was hooked. About all I knew of her was that she was a resister. I hoped to find her on the flats and perhaps watch the fireworks show with her beside her tent.

So that is how I came to be at the Aquatic Centre dock, stepping fatefully onto a taxi ferry, the Spirit of Anne Drennan. That is why I happened to be on board the Anne Drennan at 1:25 p.m., the moment the Mulroney came steaming into the mouth of False Creek to make its show of force, the moment our ferry skipper was busy adjusting a lashed-on mountain bike and so did not see the grey prow bearing down on us, the moment our little boat was cleaved in two, sending all of us into the water, sending that toddler, strapped into his Aprica stroller, sinking fast towards the toxin-laden murk of False Creek's bottom. I didn't think enough to have been brave. My legs and arms were strong from all that beach volleyball and Ultimate, and I swam down, that's all. I reached the kid, unbuckled him, hauled him to the surface, side-stroked to the Granville Island quay and delivered him, still breathing, into the hands of waiting resisters.

No one at the time called me a hero. Too many other people were in the water with me, thrashing about, trying to save themselves or others. But at least I got to meet your mother in all the chaos -- yes, Wendy Shannon, who would become our favourite nightly newscaster -- but back then she was a quiet fighter, not the talking head she is today.

It was only a few days later, when the CityState-istas saw the political potential in having a hero, that I was drafted for the job. Your mother's the one who put me up to it, who brought them my name. Already by then she had considerable sway over me, for I should tell you this, Nanaimo Bar o' mine: On Jan. 18, 2002, I not only helped save one life, I helped create another. You were conceived that night under a full moon, your mother and I making love in the curlicue shadows thrown by the remaining "E" and "S" of the Bridges sign, the two of us too hurried to bother to throw a tarp on the smelly gorp beneath us. I remember as we lay in the ooze, hearing the far-off mournful whistle of the wind through Bjossa's perforated fin.

Recipe for revolt

Drunken soldiers, a distracted ferry skipper, a Frisbee jock looking for sex in the mud -- of such elements are revolutions made, for the history books now gravely intone that the shooting of Bjossa and the sinking of the Anne Drennan comprised Vancouver's version of the Boston Tea Party. It and the royal wedding excitement whipped 58 per cent of the populace toward a clear-cut vote for independence on Referendum Day. Within a week, France, Iran, Slovenia, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Monaco and Quebec had recognized Vancouver's sovereign status, while U.S. president Gore adopted a "wait-and-see approach." Manning was all folksy conciliation, saying "I've always advocated a decentralized Canada," and "Okay, fellow citizens of the West, you've got my attention. Let's talk." He just didn't get it! No amount of talk (and there would be plenty over the next two years as the terms of secession were worked out) would change the fact that Manning would forever more be known as The Man Who Lost Vancouver.

The sharp, last-second swing to yes had caught most B.C. politicians on the losing side, too. The "Gonzo Gordos" -- Wilson, Campbell and Premier Gibson -- had bet wrongly with their alternative campaign for an independent British Columbia. Now they found themselves wandering dazed through the halls of Victoria's Legislature, Canadians still, but stripped of half the province's people.

And how painful it must have been to see the spoils fall to the likes of me! For interim CityState president Lee lost no time in naming me "Emissary at Large for Media Ops." What a moment! To stand with our leader on the salvaged bow of the Anne Drennan, our hands clasped high in triumph, beaming as Francine cried out, so famously: "Hey Vancouver! We're Free and Easy!" How intoxicating, the cheers!

I know it now. I was insanely greedy for the attention thrust onto me in those first heady years of CityState, when no official function was complete without a few words of inspiration from Mick Singh Parson. I admit it. I lost myself to sybaritic temptations, fine food, the best vintages, those Cohiba cigars. And most addicting: hero worship. I was the hero who let his body go, oblivious to hanging belly, hungover head. I was the hero who shrugged off his work ethic, taking for granted my new livelihood as... what? Mickey Parson, pitchman on TV for someone's new condo development. Or "celebrity guide": for someone else's ritzy package tour. Or (biggest stretch of all) advisor to CityState on "international image enhancement through alternative sport." I never really knew what I'd be doing for money from one week to the next, just that plenty of slick operators had ideas for me, had need for my famous face attached to their schemes. I knew, as well, that every night there would be parties for good causes, parties where my drunken smile would draw to me equally drunken women in low-cut cocktail dresses, the white flash of paparazzi cameras bathing me again and again in the warmth of social arrival.

Where, you ask, was your Mom in all this? Sigh. So quickly did the mud dry on our lovemaking, so quickly did the laughter of your mother begin to grate on me like, well, a miswired car alarm, that you, sadly, never knew a father and mother living and loving under the same roof. I am so sorry for that. You will have to ask your mother whether she originally viewed me as (I suspect) a convenient sperm donor, or whether she would have wanted a life with me even if I hadn't become a celebrity. All I know is that, had I to do it all over again, I would have finished out UBC, taught history, been a better Daddy to you. That I didn't has caused, very nearly, the ruination of my body and soul.

Fat and happy

I am trying, as I write this, to pinpoint when and how and why not only I but CityState itself surrendered to an impossibly rosy, and therefore dangerous, vision of the future. I can't blame us for our early optimism, a giddiness rewarded, it seemed, by images of success flashing one after another. "Asia Bets Big on Vancouver's Solo Play: Investment Pouring In" trumpeted the Sun of May 19, 2002, a few short months after independence.

That summer Richmond's sci-fi skyline materialized at a stunning rate, and in the fall construction began, in the wreckage of Mount Pleasant, on the Disney F/X R&D Post-Industrial Park. In spring of 2003, the formal elections for president went off without a hitch, Francine McDermott Lee winning by a landslide. Every day more money gushed in from everywhere -- and naturally some of it was dirty. "We Launder the World" is how The Province headlined its big story on Vancouver as a centre for global chicanery under the new lax financial regulations. But who really cared? Already by then our streets glittered with more ZILs and Lexuses than any other North American city.

More troubling, perhaps, was the ever growing presence of the Russian mob. They were the bucks and brawn behind most of the newly approved, expanding network of "neighbourhood-style" pubs and clubs, with their brazen television screens of formerly illegal dimensions. All this made Vancouver more interesting, more "real," more "big-city," we liked to say as we sipped Gin ‘n' Orbitz in a back booth at Vlad's on Broadway. The occasional execution, in the dead of night deep within Endowment Lands forests, was discreet enough to feel unthreatening to the pleasant flow of life in CityState. More immediate to everyone's consciousness was the luscious revival of all the public rhododendron gardens; the four 1,000-foot bank towers begun in the downtown core; the private, toll-financed repair of bridges and bike lanes. Most reassuring of all, the painstaking reconstruction of Granville Island as a perfect replica of what had stood before.

Quake-ravaged Vancouver was determined to make herself -- and this is the only word -- nice again. Very nice. And the nicer she looked, the nicer she felt, so the more money came her way, and so the better she could dress, the more suitors she attracted. Of course, when you are desired by the rich, you easily tire of the riffraff, find it necessary to consign them to "their own" circles, no more to intrude upon your elevated sensibility. I can't tell you where all the poor went in those years. Some of them certainly eked out existences in the notorious shanties that collected like so many barnacles beneath the new tower community of Richmond. Others were forced down the Fraser River Valley to hinterlands like Chilliwack and Matsqui and Harrison Lake.

Out there, too often in the spring of 2004, the night sky was lit by the flames of a burning Toys R Us or Home Depot, casualties in the "mall skirmishes" that broke out between municipalities squabbling over who should be included within the boundaries of CityState. For every Abbotsfordian dead set against joining the "Gomorra on the Strait" there was a Missionite begging to have his income tax halved and house price doubled within CityState's borders. On Jan. 30, 2005, after nearly three years of dickering, the official CityState lines were drawn, extending down from the top of the Whistler panhandle north of Pemberton, taking in both Garibaldi and Golden Ears parks, then heading east along both sides of the Fraser as far as Chilliwack. Because of the Hope corridor's strategic importance, it was to be jointly administered, even though residents had voted to stay in Canada. After endless town-hall meetings (this B&B wanted in, that craft shop out), the Sunshine Coast, Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands opted to stay in Canada, with an option to revisit CityState membership in 10 years' time. The day after Lee personally wrapped up the border negotiations, she waved goodbye to an adoring crowd and flew off in her private jet for a richly deserved vacation in Singapore.

Two weeks later she returned with new energy, inspiration, and policies to be rubber stamped (as always) by the Greater Vancouver Congress. CityState would offer "No Red-Tape Residency" to anyone who could pay the price: $1.1 million Orcas, the new currency, roughly equivalent to $1.7 million US. Immigrant service workers, on the other hand, would be issued short-term visas only, and those would have to be sponsored by the hiring corporation. Finally, our president named six top real-estate developers to a new Quality of Experience Board. They were to help "nurture property and experience values" by suggesting "effective management strategies" for a gamut of public irritants, from panhandlers to leaf blowers to the crackle of Russian gang semi-automatics that occasionally shattered the calm of toney neighbourhoods.

Dotted lines

Lee's political investments, as usual, soon manifested themselves in bottom-line figures. "Rainy Vancouver an Investor's Wet Dream," declared Forbes in June 2005. And over the summer our tourism stats eclipsed the highest pre-quake levels. In celebration, Lee declared a CityState holiday for Aug. 21. What little I can remember of that day, I sorely rue. Before the fireworks I was to present Golden Role Model medals to members of the CityState Formation Windsurfing Team. Too late and all alone, I awakened on the houseboat of some Deep Cove woman whose name I never got. I showed up late stinking of Cointreau and bilge water. The TV cameras caught me in the audience, my head between my knees, as a stand-in, Culture Minister Joe Average, gave out the medals. The next day when I saw Francine in the halls, she refused to make contact with my still-bloodshot eyes. When you're a hero, everyone wants to make eye contact with you. Even the president. But not this day. Not ever again, in fact.

Let me here cite some well-known facts, and you (my tender little halibut cheek with just a tad of dilled aioli), may draw your own conclusions.

On Feb. 2, 2006, President Lee, in her State of the CityState address, announces the formation of a new police "auxiliary" at the command of the Quality of Experience Board. Called QOEs, their mandate is to "enforce the quality of experience that has made Vancouver the envy of the world."

On March 9, six dead "Russians," (unfairly, the name came to refer to anyone involved in gang activity) are found buried in a shallow grave in Squamish. A QOE car was sighted there two days earlier; autopsy results are never released.

On April 24, seven Robson street revellers are mowed down in a drive-by shooting. A Russian-owned Tatra is said to be seen speeding away.

On May 19, a QOE SWAT team shoots it out with gangsters at a Marine Drive stronghold. One QOE is killed. Three Russians are dead, four in custody.

On July 4, President Lee's Yukon is shot at by an unknown and, fortunately, unsuccessful would-be assassin. Shell casings found nearby are Russian-made.

On Sept. 2, Lee announces new plans for a "leisure complex" to be built on the Coal Harbour island that was created from the digging of the Lions Gate Tunnel eight years previous. Casinos and an Amsterdam-style red-light district are slated. "Our CityState was built on the principle that every lifestyle has its place. For certain lifestyles," declared the president, "that place will be Stanley Island."

On Sept. 11, a Sun column by David Baines reveals that Russian money will finance the Stanley Island complex, the result, Baines surmises, of a pact reached between CityState officialdom and gang bosses. Lee angrily denounces the Baines thesis, but Stanley Island forever more is popularly dubbed "Russian Island."

Surely you see how these dots connect. People far more shrewd and powerful than I saw great benefit in forming a peace pact, a working arrangement, between the two Vancouvers, the "nice" Vancouver of bike paths and family festivals every week, and the nefarious Vancouver, amoral in its pursuit of global profit. There was no use waging war on the Russians. Had they been routed, ruthless others from some other wild economic frontier -- Mexico City? Saigon? Sofia? Orlando? -- would have filled the vacuum Vancouver offered by its very construct (laissez-faire policies towards nearly all but lawn care). So do not blame me for going to work as a greeter for Kasino Moskva on Russian Island. I did not defect to the Russians, for the Russians, by that point, were us.

Oh to be a Koala

Besides, as I say, I had fallen out of favour with the president, was no longer useful to her public-relations machine. My well-chronicled debaucheries were no advertisement for the new "Green & Clean" drive at CityState headquarters. Who wanted me in the picture on Dec. 6, 2007, when the president made that day's announcement? The old, pre-independence boundaries of Vancouver proper were declared to surround a special "Quality of Life" zone, with extra moneys going to park maintenance and policing. Within the zone tough noise, cleanliness, landscaping and teen-behaviour ordinances were to be rigidly enforced. It wasn't long before someone came up with a cute nickname for those fortunate enough to inhabit the idyllic Quality of Life zone: Koalas. Koalas saw the worth of their homes redouble overnight. Anyone who was anyone was a Koala. Needless to say, I was not.

So, month after month, year after year, I left my ugly little townhouse in Burnaby and slogged to Russian Island for the night shift as "hospitality provider," sometimes calling bingo, sometimes running the hash bar, sometimes auctioning off evening "escorts" to conventioneers from Omaha and Osaka. By then, CityState seemed to have reached a thriving equilibrium. Canada, still consumed with all the diplomacy and guerrilla war that went with the never-ending Quebec situation, was only too grateful that Vancouver, amicably separated, actually paid economic dividends to its former master. As Prime Minister Harris was fond of pointing out, Vancouver CityState stimulated more world trade with Canada than it had before independence.

Meanwhile, cheap housing and minimal environmental regulations enabled the corridor from Blaine to Everett to become, according to the New York Times, "A New Tijuana" to Vancouver's robust economy. Everyone found their level, helped along, often, by CityState planners. A good example: all those old shopping malls beyond the Quality of Life zone that were transformed into social housing. They served as homes to our gardeners, nannies and baristas. If there were fault lines in CityState's newly formed social crust, I never noticed. The occasional uprising by the unwashed -- the Richmond Riots, the Metrotown Massacre, the Langley Lootings -- occurred on distant peripheries, usually after Grizzlies or Canucks losses. All was very pleasant within the Quality of Life zone, and on their island the Russians maintained their own strict brand of security.

Every week, CityState played host to a new entourage wanting to study and emulate our progressive ways. Our achievement in converting all cars to Ballard fuel-cell technology. Our cruise complex, finished in 2010, with slips for nine actual ocean liners and indoor bays for two weatherproof virtual-reality luxury cruises. Our success in bucking the global trend towards troublesome younger demographics: CityState had, by 2009, the world's lowest percentage of population under 16. I tell you, it was one world-class piece of social engineering.

For all the mess that we, and especially me, find ourselves in today, I blame those for whom no Utopia will ever be Utopian enough. I am speaking of certain breakaway factions within both the CityState government and the Russian mafia. I am speaking of those who lured me into the middle of their clumsy, destructive grabs for each other's throats and now want to make me the scapegoat for their failed plotting. Let me put it straight. I simply arranged the meeting of May 1, 2012. Ten QOE cops and 10 Russian mobsters all sitting in the Wall Centre Heritage Penthouse with a map spread out between them like something from a Batman cartoon. The QOE wanted to move beyond truce, wanted now a share in the action in exchange for certain favours. That's what I was told. And it was the QOE -- well, the five clean ones --scrambling for their own semi-automatics, sending the Russians diving behind a breakfast bar and a couch, leaving me stupidly holding out the cigarette lighter I was just about to flick for my boss.

Pure Tarantino. QOEs pointing guns at Russians. Russians pointing guns at QOEs. QOEs pointing guns at QOEs. Russians pointing guns at me. Everybody thought I was the one to set them up for a rubout, when all I ever wanted to do was play the middleman, to be liked after my years of disgrace. Why seven men died that day and not me, I still don't know. I just remember the elevator was open, waiting, and the taxi driver on Burrard was only too happy to get a fare to the airport.

If not a hero, if not even liked, all I ever wanted to be was, at minimum, needed. Gee, I'm a "victim." Crap. Political correctness died in 2002.

Well, CityState sure needs me now. The corrupt wing of the QOE needs me dead so I can't expose their treachery. The straight-arrow faction of the QOE needs me to symbolize all that must be cleaned up in CityState, and so it spread abominable lies about me masterminding the assassination attempt on the President, and even me wanting to sell you, my own dear daughter, into slavery on Russian Island. The Russians, well, they need me dead because I have become a liability rather than an asset, and because to kill me might appease the QOEs, might buy them a way back to business as usual.

Do you, as well, still want me dead after reading this, my dear daughter, my sprinkle of cinnamon on the frothy half-and-half that is the surface of life? If so, you may imagine your wish granted, and you may never hear from me again. Maybe they've caught up to me and finished me off. Maybe I have done the job myself. Or maybe (and only if you will it, my dear daughter) I have begun a new life in one of the other great city-states -- New New Orleans? JakartaNike? Montreal? -- whose turn it is now to point the way towards Heaven on Earth, our next Utopia.

[Author's note: Well that's where I, tongue in cheek, saw Vancouver headed when I wrote this for Vancouver magazine in 1997. What do you think I got right and wrong? And if you've seen Mick Singh Parson in the two years since he disappeared in 2012, please post a comment and reveal what our fallen hero is doing with himself today.]  [Tyee]

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