Just Fix It, Already!

'Hey Sammy, maybe there's a golden poll over this way!'

PimpYourPark
PolVille

Vancouver, like San Francisco, has a beautiful park that sits right on the water.

It's a park called Stanley and it has all the amenities anybody could ever want, happily built at public expense throughout Vancouver's history.

Thus, it truly is a people's park, and we Vancouverites want everyone to enjoy all it has to offer.

Stanley Park also has some very large tracts of forest, some of it pseudo-old growth.

And, just like in Timothy Taylor's novel of the same name, the Park also has a few crazy wild-men who live in its deepest, darkest environs.

Well, anyway, it turns out that one of those wild-men woke up a few weeks ago to the sounds of a toppling trees that were blown over by a huge winter wind storm, the gusts of which approached hurricane force.

Now, again, this is a public park.

So, you would think that our current governments would have stepped in immediately and made plans to take care of the devastation.

Unfortunately that, most definitely, did not happen.

Instead, while the pooh-bahs dithered and instead took their extended photo-ops (one of which included a much trumpeted, and trumped-up, visit from the newly minted anti-environment Environment Minister John Baird), we, the public, were bamboozled into forking over more than $1 million dollars of our own money for restoration projects that was then matched, gleefully, by local corporations and billionares after a drive-by media-induced frenzy.

And only now, after both the Park and the Public have been screwed over royally by the Pols and their PR Pimps, have local governments started to do the right thing, which is commit dollars - our tax dollars- to help nurse our park back to health.

Which, in retrospect, is what shame-faced Johns do everywhere I suppose.

But, on the bright side, it could have been worse.

After all, Messer's Sullivan and Campbell (aka 'The Glimmer Twins' pictured above) could have decided that, once they were finished doing their business, that they were going to build a brothel, .....errr.... private hunting lodge, on the shores of the park's Beaver Lake to serve as a way-station for weary Bush Rangers and OilCo Execs* in need of servicing on their way to the deflowering of the Haida Gwaii.

OK?

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*Sheesh. As the Gazetteer's articling archivist, Big Audible Dyn-O-Mite, has pointed out, we need to be careful here. After all, if we start giving these people ideas they may run with them in an effort to keep local luminaries like the Fraser Institute's Mr. Walker from from hightailing it to Alberta when then they decide it is once again time to host the real bigshot/buckshot buckeroos from down south.



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