Tea & Two Slices is a long-running local news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown, deeply aware of his privilege.
Welcome to BC, where someone should really do something: B.C. is no longer a model for COVID-19 prevention — and getting back to that stage is not guaranteed.
I get it. COVID fatigue is real. So is complacency and willful ignorance. We’re throwing massive parties and mask use seems to be on the decline. Passengers with COVID-19 keep arriving in Canada on international flights and we’re forcing parents to send their kids back to school (albeit with some delay).
We’ve only just now made mask wearing mandatory on transit and less than 4% of Canadians have the COVID Alert tracing app. 1,500 people are in self-isolation and there were 131 new cases over the weekend. We’ve created a moral panic so we can blame young people instead of our willingness to put the economy above human lives. Oh, and winter is coming.
B.C is no longer a model for anything other than how to launder money and do nothing in the face of the double crises of housing and opioids. It’s a neoliberal paradise where we give the Order of BC to real estate developers without a shred of irony.
Enter our esteemed intellectuals like Wade Davis in Rolling Stone, waxing poetic about Safeway clerks and how we singlehandedly beat COVID with our shining social equity and justice — a romantic and revisionist polemic rooted in that specific brand of Canadian smugness while ignoring our shocking wealth disparity, entrenched racism, pathological unfriendliness and gutless political leadership.
Deanna Kreisel, a former tenured English professor at UBC, eviscerates Davis’s generalizations about the social conditions of Vancouver: The Unraveling of “The Unraveling of America”:
“The checkout person may not share your level of affluence,” but if you’ve been paying the tiniest shred of attention to the people around you, Mr. Davis, then you know that they know that you know that they are barely surviving. By the time I left the city last year, storefront after storefront in my own neighborhood — the comparatively more “affordable” area near Commercial Drive — was shuttered due to labor shortages. Workers simply couldn’t afford to live in the city on the wages paid by a typical retail job.
And then there are our psychotic landlords: Landlord removes windows and doors after Maple Ridge, B.C. mom late with rent. And these people wonder why we hate landlords? This is disgusting and illegal and it leaves us with no choice but to be radical.
Indeed:
I don’t know who needs to hear this but A Domestic Safe Supply of Injectable Heroin Would Save Lives. There’s a way but do we have the will?
Speaking of having the will, Indigenous-led community care is exactly what we need: Community group starting volunteer patrol around Strathcona Park. Because tent cities aren’t going away.
Cops can trace a girl with a molotov cocktail to a shirt she bought on Etsy but when it comes to investigating their own… Vancouver police fail to identify officers accused of ‘inappropriate comments,’ racism. This is them on their best behaviour, but yeah, tell me again how the VPD isn’t racist.
A real soap opera: U.K. cosmetics giant Lush sues Vancouver-based head of North American operations. Props to this lede: “A disagreeable whiff of infighting is in the air at the normally fragrant Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics…”
Long read: WE is actually we.
Sure, CERB, the Safe Third Country Agreement, Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, temporary foreign workers and literally everything related to COVID-19 is more important, but this crisis has legs. And it has legs for the most fundamental reason: WE is a beast that only a country like Canada could create.
Bonus: thanks to the Leaves for a pang of consistency: Leafs bring comfort and normalcy during tough times by collapsing in playoffs.
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As an American raised by Republicans, I find that Davis piece appalling. Yes, it’s gratingly smug about Canada, but it’s also badly mistaken about the USA. Davis takes (so-called) conservatives’ rhetoric at face value – ironic, given his recognition that their current leader is a spectacularly compulsive liar – and concludes they’re hyper-individualists who just don’t give a damn about other people. That’s true of a minority, some of whom call themselves “libertarians”, but most conservatives aren’t so much individualists as tribalists, who would rather wreck the country than share it with non-white people as anything like equals. The reason they hate “big government” is that since the 1960s, government has been, however belatedly and reluctantly, the great equalizer: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, etc. The effort to cripple government represents a convergence of pathologies: white people who want to keep government from benefiting non-white people, and rich people who want lower taxes and less restraint of their depredations. The former would be happy with socialism, provided it were for whites only, as it largely was under Franklin Roosevelt. The latter, however, prefer le capitalisme sauvage, as the French call it. And since the latter bankroll propagandists and politicians, the outcome is no surprise.