Housing policy: why Gregor gets it (and Gary doesn’t)

I’m going to assume that Gary Mason, a national columnist with the Globe and Mail and a long time sportswriter with the Vancouver Sun, is the kind of person that walks with their head down. How else to explain the fact that he appears to be blind to the virtues of the federal government’s dormant co-op housing program despite having spent most of the last 30 years living, writing, and presumably thinking in a city whose urban architecture is defined in part by them?

In his Monday column for the Globe and Mail, Mason rips Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson for having the temerity to press the federal government to revive the program as part of a national housing strategy. Mason discusses Robertson’s presence in Ottawa and his intention to spend more time in the nation’s capital lobbying on behalf of Vancouver’s interests, arguing that “where Mr. Robertson is wasting his time…is with his campaign for a national housing strategy. He insists this is a huge priority. That’s a shame, not to mention a waste of his time.” It’s a waste of time, Mason continues, because “the federal government has no money. And the last thing it’s going to do is re-institute the country’s co-op housing program – for which Mr. Robertson is asking.”

I’ll get to the program’s considerable merits in a moment, but it’s important to quickly address Mason’s notion that “the federal government has no money.” The federal government, in fact, has plenty of money to spend. In the budget that was brought down last week, the federal government committed to spending over a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2010. It’s not as though the federal government is feeling particularly miserly these days, either, as demonstrated by its willingness to run a $53.8 billion deficit in the upcoming fiscal year. No, what Gary Mason meant to say is that the government has no interest in spending money on this particular program. It’s a question of priorities, not of capability. The government is free to make a number of choices if it wanted to fund the co-op housing program, from raising taxes to diverting spending from other areas of the budget (defence, anyone?) Framing it as an impossible request, as Mason did, essentially hand delivers the Conservatives an excuse for not supporting Robertson’s initiative and reviving the program.

Mason also appears to be misinformed about the program itself, and what it achieved when it was in place. It isn’t, as he says, a question of whether “we should subsidize people making more than $100,000 a year so they can live in Vancouver?” Are there people who make $100,000 or more living in some of Vancouver’s co-op housing units? Absolutely. But that’s by design, not accident, and it’s neither an indictment of the program nor a reason not to fund it again. The program was a response to the failed housing policies of the post-WWII era, which saw the government take a distinctly Soviet approach to the construction of affordable housing. The best example of that approach’s flaws was Regent Park, a monument to the human misery that its design inflicted upon its residents. Mercifully, the City of Toronto embarked upon a 12-year, $1 billion revitalization program of the neighbourhood in 2006.

Vancouver, in contrast, is a model of the success of the program that followed. Rather than building massive planned communities like Regent Park, Canada’s fledgling co-op housing movement encouraged the government to focus instead on supporting smaller scale, mixed-income housing that would be sponsored, built, owned, and managed by community-based not-for-profit groups. Drawing heavily on the principles articulated by urban theorist and Toronto resident Jane Jacobs in 1968’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” the co-op movement advocated an approach that would support the residents of affordable housing rather than segregating and marginalizing them.

It worked, too. For proof, one need look no further than the stretch of land on the south side of False Creek bounded by the Granville and Cambie Street Bridges. Today, it’s defined by a collection of apartment buildings and row homes interspersed with parkland and community features, and its residents live a pretty wonderful life, nestled in a quiet family-friendly neighbourhood yet close to both the delicacies of Granville Island Market and the bustle of downtown. Yet forty years ago, the land on which they live was an industrial wasteland, a ragged stretch of polluted soil that ringed a creek so filthy it made the water in Lake Erie look downright drinkable. It was the federal government’s co-op housing program that made its redevelopment – its reincarnation, really – possible. Today, it stands as a monument, alongside one-off buildings like the Quebec Manor at Quebec and 7th Avenue and the Manhattan Building on Robson and Thurlow Streets, to the success of the federal co-op housing program and the real improvements it made to both the lives of its residents and the fabric of the city in which they live.

Mason makes it sound like the revival of the co-op program would be a major budget item, noting that the Liberals got out of it in 1992 because “it was prohibitively expensive.” But everything was prohibitively expensive when it came to the Chretien Liberals and their deficit-fighting fervour. More importantly, barring some kind of gun control registry fiasco, it’s difficult to see how it would deserve that kind of description today. The previous program, after all, didn’t build the housing units, but instead furnished mortgage loan guarantees and supplied rent supplements for certain units. In essence, the government provided a bit of seed capital and institutional support for these co-operatives, rather like a well to-do parent who helps his or her kids finance the purchase of their own home. The only difference is that Canada’s largesse helped house over 250,000 people across the country in over 2,000 different complexes.

I grew up in this urban planning petri dish, and I can attest to its virtues. The community of False Creek is both a deeply integrated and functional one, with people of varying backgrounds, incomes, and family orientations living and learning together. The people earning the big bucks that Mason refers to so disparagingly are actually integral to the success of most co-ops, as their market-rent units help to subsidize the rents that are charged to their less affluent neighbours. Without this direct benefit of the mixing of incomes, and the indirect social and cultural ones that Jane Jacobs detailed in her famous book, False Creek might well have become another Regent Park. Instead, it’s a success, and it’s one that will continue to improve the lives of the people lucky enough to live in it.

I applaud Mayor Robertson for taking Ottawa to task for its decision in 1992 to abandon this productive program. Sure, he could head to Ottawa and lobby for tax cuts, longer prison sentences, or some other policy that would please his Conservative hosts. But Robertson is looking more and more like a politician who knows what he wants and has a pretty good idea of how to get it, and the good news for Vancouverites unsympathetic to the policies of the Harper government is that the things he wants are the things we need. Mason notes that Robertson “could be setting himself up for a huge fall,” and wonders “just how much political capital Mr. Robertson is prepared to spend in pursuit of his housing dream.” Mason seems to be making two miscalculations here, though. The first concerns just how much political capital Robertson has already earned as Mayor. The second, and more important miscalculation, is Robertson’s apparent willingness to spend it on the right cause.

The real problem with health care funding

There was a palpable sense of relief in Victoria last Tuesday as the so-called “reality” budget was delivered by the BC Liberal government. There were no deep cuts to social spending, only the formalization of promised reductions to funding for arts, culture, and sports groups, and while those were bad the news contained in the budget could certainly have been a lot worse. Ironically, while the spending cuts weren’t as deep as some feared, it may be the one significant funding increase in the budget that will do the most damage in the long-term for people in this province.

Massive increases in health care funding have become so commonplace in this country over the last five years that they no longer warrant discussion. In the wake of the Romanow and Kirby reports of the early 2000s, the three major political parties in this country even reached something of a consensus on health care – more money good, less money bad – that has lasted far longer than the temporary cease-fires to which they will sometimes agree. The only source of disagreement between them when it comes to health care is over whether enough money is being allocated to health care and if it’s being spent quickly enough.

Certainly, that was the case for the $2 billion that the BC Liberals pledged to pour down the gullet of health care in this province in their recent budget. While the NDP’s official website has press releases that criticize everything from the budget’s effect on the agricultural industry to the pain it will inflict on post-secondary students, it makes no mention of the $2 billion allocated for health care. Health care advocates, not surprisingly, complained that the 4.1 per cent increase in annual funding was an insufficient investment and would result in cancelled surgeries and other inconveniences.

For anyone with a longer view of the situation, though, the $2 billion that was poured into health care, and the fact that spending on it now constitutes over 42 per cent of total government spending in the province of British Columbia, is an alarmingly short-sighted investment. Unfettered access to quality health care services delivered in a timely fashion is an advantage that Canadians have become both accustomed to and protective of, and with good reason. When contrasted with the horror show to the south, our comparatively generous health care system is an asset that improves our quality of life and informs our national identity as Canadians.

But what if our system is too generous? The reflexive comparison that we make between our system and the American one, and the brief but intoxicating sense of superiority that it gives us, blinds us to the price that we pay for our health care privileges. The fact that it already consumes over 40 per cent of most provincial budgets should be enough to encourage a re-examination of our attitude towards health care by policy makers and elected officials. If it doesn’t, the fiscal consequences of the imminent arrival of a massive generation of overfed and under-exercised Baby Boomers who will demand nothing less than the best ought to do the trick.

In short, we’re facing a crucial social and cultural decision, even if we’re not yet willing to confront it. With the retirement of the Baby Boomers and the consequent decline in the dependency ratio – the number of workers for every non-working person – the pool of revenues with which our governments fund social programs like education, child care, and health care, isn’t going to increase unless there’s a significant tax increase. Given the unpopularity of tax increases and fealty that our elected officials pay to public opinion, a tax increase significant enough to mitigate the exodus of tax-paying Baby Boomers, much less one big enough to actually increase government revenues, is about as likely as Stockwell Day beating Stephen Harper at a game of scrabble.

The pressing political question for the next twenty years, then, will be this: do we continue to defer investment in other areas, and reduce funding for other programs, to fund the ever-expanding demands of our health care system? Are we willing to behave like somebody who lives in a 300 square foot bachelor apartment and eats Kraft dinner every night so that he can make the payments on our new BMW 5-series? Or do we re-assess our priorities and how we fund them, a process that would necessarily involve a discussion of the privatization of at least some parts of our health care system.

In Canada, of course, privatization is a dirty word when it comes to health care. The very idea brings to mind the system that President Obama is so desperately trying to modify in the United States, one in which access to good health care is as much a luxury as that BMW, and often costs even more. It doesn’t have to be that way, though, given the public infrastructure that our system already has built into it, and the vastly different attitude that we have as a nation towards the provision of health care services. The choice isn’t between our system and the American one, but between our system and a slimmed-down one that might allow our governments to make meaningful investments in other programs and priorities.

The problem with funding health care ad infinitum, as we seem prepared to do in Canada right now, is that the returns on that investment are a bit uninspiring. Yes, it allows us to live longer and better lives, and when it comes time for us to make use of the health care system we surely want nothing else than the best. But at a more critical distance, investing billions upon billions of dollars into health care makes less sense. Education, for example, has a demonstrably positive effect on society, both in creating a more educated work force and a more civilized and peaceable people.

More importantly, education returns value on the money invested in it, as those more capable workers are more likely to find meaningful and rewarding employment, and with it find themselves writing a more sizable cheque to the Canada Revenue Agency each year. Investments in childcare have a similarly positive economic payoff, as low-cost daycare can liberate single parents – usually women – from poverty by allowing them to seek work, and in turn pay taxes rather than collect social benefits like EI and welfare. The billions that we currently spend on health care doesn’t offer this kind of upside, unfortunately. Is having timely access to, say, a hip replacement, a worthwhile investment? Maybe. Is it worth sacrificing a daycare program or access to post-secondary education for ten high school kids for? Not a chance.

Ultimately, it comes down to a pretty simple choice. Do we want to invest in the future, in the long-term prosperity of this country and the people who hope to make a life in it, or in providing timely access to elective surgeries and non-essential procedures? Politics is about choices, and this one seems like a pretty straightforward one to make. The problem is that our politicians haven’t presented it to us yet. One wonders if they ever will, given the attendant political consequences involved with potentially alienating this country’s largest and most politically engaged demographic, the Baby Boomers.

And now, for something completely different

At the rather insistent request of a friend I’ve decided to move to a topic other than the Olympics. But the subject onto which I’m moving won’t please the people that another friend of mine calls the Serotonin Police because I’m not writing about the miracle of spring, the inspirational power of athletic endeavour (and there I go, straying close to the Olympics again….) or anything else deliberately uplifting or cheerful. Instead, I want to talk about the budget that was delivered in British Columbia on Tuesday and the Speech from the Throne that came down on Wednesday, and why both should worry anyone under the age of 40.

The facts and figures in Tuesday’s provincial budget, delivered in Victoria by British Columbia Finance Minister Colin Hansen, were a jarring counterpoint to the euphoria that followed Canada’s victory over the United States in the men’s hockey gold medal game just two days earlier. The government that swore it would never tolerate deficit spending is doing just that, with a projected shortfall in government revenues over expenditures of $1.7 billion expected for the 2010 fiscal year. Spending on everything except health and education has been cut or capped, and the BC Liberals hope that this dose of fiscal prudence will is return the province to balanced budgets by 2013-14.

In Ottawa on Wednesday, meanwhile, Governor General Michaelle Jean read the Harper goverment’s latest throne speech, and it too was directed squarely at restoring balance to the budget. In addition to holding departmental operating budgets at their current levels, the Harper government also intends to freeze their own salaries for the next year. But like the province of British Columbia, the federal government’s deficit reduction strategy appears to be heavily contingent upon a strong economic rebound in the next few years. Given the ongoing difficulties in the European economies, the inevitability of interest rate increases, and Canada’s dependence on exports, that rebound looks more like an act of wishful thinking than an honest
reading of the economic climate.

Still, the issue of deficits and how they ought to be tackled is that rarest of birds in the zoo that is Canadian politics, a topic on which both sides of the ideological spectrum can at least appear to agree. The only place where they diverge in their approach the deficit issue is on the question of tactics, as those on the right tend to favour the economic equivalent of a crash diet while those on the left prefer a more cautious, pound-by-pound approach. Yet as Rick Salutin observed in one of his recent Globe and Mail columns, this superficial agreement about the need to combat deficits is fuelled by very different motivating interests. “For the right,” he said, “it’s an excuse to slash “big government,” where the left “uses deficit terror to counter what it fears is its lack of hard-headed economic credibility.” Meantime, Salutin notes, “the serious questions — not: Should taxes be raised or lowered? but: On whom should they be raised or lowered? — aren’t discussed.”

That’s almost it, but he’s missing an important piece. The most serious question of all, “who will end up paying off this debt?” isn’t even considered, much less discussed. In short, deficits of the size we’re running up today amount to a tax on the prosperity of tomorrow to pay for the comforts of today. After all, while optimistic finance ministers like Colin Hansen and Jim Flaherty might like to proclaim that we’ll be back in the black in a few years, the size of the deficits that are being run up right now, combined with the time it took to pay back the relatively smaller ones incurred a generation ago by the Trudeau and Mulroney governments, points to a much longer amortization period. Canada’s budget deficit for 2009 was a staggering $55.9 billion, a figure that dwarfs the $42 billion that precipitated the frenetic cutting of social programs and spending by Paul Martin and Jean Chretien in the mid 1990s. It’s those under 40 who will be paying this debt off for a long, long time, and it’s more than likely that we won’t be the ones who will have benefited the most, or even at all, from its largesse.

Young people ought to be outraged by the deficits our provincial and federal governments are racking up, and they should be demanding the swift repayment of them. They aren’t, of course, just as they aren’t outraged by anything our political leaders say or do these days, which makes this act of inter-generational theft easy – too easy – to get away with. But whether or not my generation pays attention to what’s happening is, on a moral level, not particularly important. We’re being stolen from, and it’s wrong. It’s time somebody said something about it, even if nobody is really listening.

Don’t do it, Toronto!

Somebody needs to rescue Stephen Johns, or at the very least throw a few glasses of cold water in his direction. Johns, after all, appears to be suffering from the journalist’s equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, an unfortunate victim of the aggressive public relations campaign that was waged by VANOC on members of the media during the 2010 Winter Olympics. How else to explain his decision to present the idea of Toronto bidding for the Olympics as anything other than an exercise in self-destructive masochism?

Torontoist, a popular Toronto-area blog, sent Johns to Vancouver to cover the Olympics, but the ideas that he’s brought back to the city I used to love are dangerous and delusional ones. In a February 28 piece, Johns argues that there’s a chance – even a good one, he says – that Toronto could host the Summer Olympics in the future, but if policy makers in Toronto are wise – hell, if they have the intellectual capacity of a grade twelve graduate – they’ll do everything in their power to prevent that from happening.

In his dispatch, Johns writes that “Vancouver has undergone a major (if not quite total) transformation since being awarded the Olympics in 2003,” noting that “parts of the city are virtually unrecognizable” and “its urban infrastructure has been dramatically upgraded.” These are talking points straight off the VANOC media guide. Unsurprisingly, they’re also a total misrepresentation of the influence that the Olympics have had on Vancouver, like saying that the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China only required the relocation of a few people.

Yes, Vancouver has the new Canada Line, an extension of the existing rapid transit line connecting the airport to the downtown core. It’s true that Vancouver has the new Richmond Speedskating Oval, a building that has, as Johns notes, won a number of architectural awards. And yes, Vancouver has the new athlete’s village, albeit one with a greatly reduced number of social and affordable housing units when compared with the plans in the original bid.

But Vancouver also has a massive debt burden that will take a very long time to pay off, depending on how quickly city council decides to raise taxes. Mayor Gregor Robertson noted that while he’d like to pay off the city’s games-related debt in “two or three years,” it’s more probable that the bill will take over a decade to clear. If the city’s real-estate market takes the kind of nose-dive that bearish analysts like Garth Turner are predicting the time line for repayment may come closer to the 30 years it took Montreal to cover its debts, given that the city is still on the hook for the units in the athlete’s village and must sell them to recover the money it invested in their completion. The province, too, is saddled with an enormous debt load from the games, and they have decided to pay off their portion by stripping the province’s social infrastructure and selling it for scrap. Tuesday’s provincial budget is expected to include massive reductions in the funding for community, sport, and culture organizations, as well as other spending cuts in what the government is describing as a “reality” budget.

The new infrastructure that Johns speaks so highly of isn’t quite as useful to the city of Vancouver, post-Olympics, as he seems to think. The speed skating oval won’t be used to inspire and train the next Cindy Klassen or Denny Morrison, or even to host local meets. Instead, it will be converted into a community centre, a glorified feedlot for middle-aged exercise junkies, with basketball courts replacing the sheet of ice. Meanwhile, the Whistler Sliding Centre, a track cooled with environmentally poisonous ammonium whose sole recreational function is propelling sledders through a series of dangerous twists and turns at speeds of over 100 km/h, isn’t much of a legacy for the community of Whistler, given that the only people who will use it are suicidal maniacs and the odd amateur athlete. Even the benefits of the Canada Line deserve qualification, given that the project was already in the planning stages before the Olympic bid was submitted to the IOC. The Canada Line has been on the drawing table of local transit planners, in some form or another, for almost twenty years. The Olympics may have brought its completion date forward, but it didn’t create the impetus for its construction.

Even the glittering new convention centre, one that was built at a cost of $886 million despite the presence of a barely twenty year-old convention centre right next door, is a poor fit for the city and its needs. Already, there’s talk that the two convention centres will simply end up competing for the same clientele, creating two relatively empty convention centres rather than one full one. Instead of building Vancouver’s convention capacity, as Premier Gordon Campbell and his Liberal government promised it would in announcing its construction in 2004, it is instead a monument to the excess capacity that the Olympics have built into this relatively small city. Fittingly, it is also the site of the Olympic Cauldron, an installation that was intended as a tourist attraction but instead became an image that was emblematic of VANOC’s intrusive and insensitive policies after they decided to restrict public access to it using a crude chain-link fence.

In essence, Vancouver and the province of British Columbia will be paying somewhere in excess of $6 billion for a seventeen day party, a few white elephants, and a new subway line that was already going to be built. Johns says that cost estimates range between $3 and $6 billion, “depending on how you crunch the numbers,” but even VANOC’s PR flacks have now accepted that the final bill of sale will come in at the high end of that range. Meanwhile, even the most optimistic projections of games-related economic activity barely exceeds $1 billion, a paltry return on a significant investment of public money.

For Johns, though, an accounting of the costs and assets associated with the investment made in the 2010 Winter Olympics fails to capture the value of the less tangible benefits associated with them. “There’s a lot to be said for what the Olympics did for our national self-esteem,” he writes, noting later that “the good vibes emanating from British Columbia will linger on.” This is a sentiment that has received a wide airing in the last two days, as journalists across the country, ones who are either trying to explain the post-Crosby national euphoria or caught up in it, discuss the value of the games in terms of “bringing Canadians together,” “uniting us in a common purpose,” or some other equally hollow cliché. Johns is near the head of that particular pack, writing that “these last two weeks have us feeling positively radiant about the Olympic movement in general. Come to think of it, why wouldn’t we want to host them ourselves if given the opportunity?”

Well, sir, I can think of at least six billion reasons.

In fact, when it comes to the idea of Toronto hosting the Olympics, I can probably think of ten or even fifteen billion reasons, since if Toronto were to host the Summer Olympics – Johns rightly points out that the lack of any local mountains would make the Winter Olympics a non-starter, although one would think that both Vancouver and Sochi’s temperate winter weather would have had the same effect on the IOC – it’s safe to assume that the costs attached to the bid would be double or even triple that of Vancouver’s given the relative size of the summer games. In light of the city’s current financial situation, and the fact that it’s unlikely that either the local or regional economy will improve in the near and medium terms, the Olympics ought to be way, way down on the city’s list of priorities, somewhere between building that bridge to the Island Airport and erecting a statue of Rob Ford in Nathan Phillips Square.

After all, the notion of investing over $10 billion (in partnership, of course, with the provincial and federal government) in a glorified party, on whose primary benefit is the enhancement of our local, provincial, and national self-esteem, is so far beyond the bounds of reason and common sense that it would give a shameless local cheerleader like Mel Lastman second thoughts. There are those of us here in Vancouver who are envious of Toronto, of its power, of its status, of its place, and of the privileges that are conferred upon it because of each. Some of those people might even wish misfortune on Toronto from time to time. But even though I’m not one of them, I think I can safely speak on their behalf here in saying that even on their worst days they wouldn’t wish the Olympics on Toronto. They might hate you Toronto, but even they don’t hate you that much.

The hockey hangover

It won’t come as a surprise to anybody who knows me well that I didn’t spend yesterday with a red maple leaf painted on my face, draped in an oversized Canadian flag, sitting at the bar of some local watering hole cheering on Canada’s men’s hockey team as they played for the gold medal against the United States. In fact, the only thing that would be less surprising to said people is the news that I didn’t participate in all the honking, shouting, broad gesticulating, and other expressions of the collective nationalist seizure that followed the win.

I’m not trying to be a buzz kill here – not actively, anyways – but I do think that the way the country responded to Team Canada’s win raises a few questions about nationalism and our relationship to it as a country. Canada isn’t the only country where the most visible displays of national pride are attached exclusively to the performance of professional athletes, of course, as the World Cup of soccer/football demonstrates so irritatingly every four years.

Still, I can’t help but wonder why we can’t show the same enthusiasm for the achievements of other Canadians, or share in the same sense of reflected patriotic pride. I’m not suggesting that people drive down the street honking their horn and waving an oversized Canadian flag out the sunroof the next time a Canadian wins the Booker Prize, although I’d be tickled to actually see one. But I still find it baffling that we assign so much value and invest so much energy into the performance of a bunch of millionaire athletes, most of whom don’t even live in Canada any longer because of the favourable tax codes to the south. Our millionaires managed to put a piece of vulcanized rubber into the net more times than their steam of millionaires. Why should that make me proud to be a Canadian?

I’m being a bit glib here, of course. I understand why people get so excited about Team Canada’s performance in the Olympics, and why they reacted so hysterically yesterday when the team won the gold medal. Hockey, for better or worse, occupies a place of privilege in our national culture. More importantly, there are no barriers to participation – all you need is a flag, a beer, and a rudimentary understanding of the rules of hockey, a combination that only an American would find problematic. Unlike, say, slam poetry, sport is an easy bandwagon on which to sit, a binary exercise in winning or losing, in us or them, and those are the conditions in nationalism thrives.

The conditions needed for a more sophisticated form of patriotic pride to grow are a lot more difficult to achieve, which might help explain the deafening roar of indifference that meets Canada Day every year in any Canadian city not named Ottawa. It’s telling, I think, that we get far more worked up about a team of millionaire athletes than we do when given the opportunity to reflect – and a day off to do it, too – on who we are, what we’ve accomplished, and how we live as Canadians.

Today’s outburst of national pride, and the conspicuous absence of similar expressions on Canada Day, reminds me of a quote from Adlai Stevenson, the former ambassador to the United Nations and Democratic Presidential candidate. “What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times,” Stevenson asked. “I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.” Granted, we aren’t in his times any more, but his observation remains important, I think. Patriotism, at its best, invokes a sense of collective responsibility and a calm, cool confidence. Neither of those were on display yesterday.

Instead, it more closely resembled George Orwell’s understanding of nationalism, which he described as being “inseparable from the desire for power.” “The abiding purpose of every nationalist,” Orwell wrote, “is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” I’m not suggesting that the crowds that gathered at the corner of Granville and Robson Street in Vancouver or Dundas and Yonge in Toronto were out for blood, or that their celebration was in any way an act of collective aggression. But the sheer number of people who responded to the win online with tweets, facebook status updates, and other online expressions of the fact that they’ve “never been prouder to be a Canadian” suggests that yesterday’s outburst of nationalism meets Orwell’s description. That pride, after all, was the product of a conquest, something achieved for us, not by us, even if it did take place on a sheet of ice. All the same, it’s not difficult to see the parallels between yesterday’s benign display of national sentiment and the more malignant ones about which Orwell was writing in 1945’s “Notes on Nationalism”.

To be fair, for many of the people who made their way down to those intersections or the many like them across the country yesterday, the event was simply an opportunity to celebrate a shared victory in an isolated and isolating world where those sorts of moments are increasingly rare. For others, it was an excuse to get publicly drunk, a rare moment of social sanction for the otherwise shameful acts of the afternoon drunkard. There’s nothing particularly wrong with either, so long as they’re properly categorized as such. But you can be certain that this one hockey game and the public response that followed it will be gassed up with hot air and paraded about for the foreseeable future by politicians, corporate partners, and anybody else who wants to tap into the cheap energy of nationalism.

More importantly, it will reinforce the idea that hockey is central to our understanding both of our selves and of each other as Canadians. That’s a shame, given all the other wonderful things that Canadians do and are. Pierre Trudeau once said that there was nothing “more ridiculous than the idea of the all-Canadian boy or girl,” but yesterday’s gold medal win will help cement the image that such an idea does exist, and that it revolves around how well a bunch of millionaire athletes play the game of hockey every four years. In so doing, it obscures alternative ways of understanding ourselves as Canadians, and interferes with the evolution of the sense of responsibility that Adlai Stevenson described fifty years ago. I’m glad that we won the gold medal, in the same way that I’m glad we won the other 13 ones at these Winter Olympics. But I worry that in doing so we’ve stunted the development of more sophisticated and mature expressions of patriotic pride.

The perils of putting a price on culture

Of all the post-Olympic hangovers few promise to be more blindingly intense than the one to which Vancouver’s arts and culture community will wake up on Monday. After a two week festival that saw the city do its best impersonation of a place that cares about providing meaningful support for the arts and culture community, Vancouver’s creative entrepreneurs will wake up to a much different reality on Monday. Like the Irish, the Alberta Pavilion, and the other geographically oriented simulacrums that shaped the city’s social life during the last two weeks, the daily assortment of cultural events and opportunities that made the Olympic spectacle at least somewhat tolerable for locals will disappear along with the crowds. The Campbell government is set to deliver its budget on March 2nd, and only the most pie-eyed of optimists would still be holding out hope that it will back away from its decision to slash core arts funding from $19.5 million in 2008 to $2.175 in 2011.

The arts and culture community has done its best to fight back against these cuts, expressing their dissatisfaction with this distinctly troglodytic policy towards the arts in a wide variety of ways and in an equally diverse range of forums. There have been youtube spoofs, letter-writing campaigns, petitions, sympathetic op-eds, and public rallies, as well as an explosion of websites like www.stopbcartscuts.ca that have tried to make the cause of this province’s artists and the destructive nature of the government’ s attitude towards them more widely known.

At the heart of many of these arguments is the notion that cutting funding to the arts is economically counterproductive, given that every dollar invested in the arts returns $1.36 to the provincial treasury. It’s easy to see why this argument has been so central to and in the case made by this province’s artists and the cultural organizations that support them. Aside from its apparently self-evident logic, it also appears to speak the only language that this government really understands. If you’re going to make a case for funding to the Campbell government, you’d better make it in terms of dollars and cents.

On the surface, it’s a compelling argument. Push a little deeper, though, and becomes clear that it’s also neither an entirely effective nor honest one. The widely quoted figure of $1.36 is a selective reading of a quote from an internal study by BC Tourism – one that isn’t peer-reviewed or vetted in any satisfactorily objective way – that puts the estimated impact of a dollar invested in the arts at “between $1.04 and $1.36.” Picking the high point of the range without even mentioning the range itself is at best disingenuous and at worst downright dishonest.

That bid of statistical fudging is a mere technical quibble when compared to the implications associated with making an argument for a more robust level of funding for the arts in purely economic terms. Art, after all, isn’t an economic product the way refrigerators or microchips are, and to even attempt to quantify its value in monetary terms risks seriously oversimplifying how we understand its value to society. By boiling the value of art and culture down to a single economic indicator, those who want to see it funded properly risk allowing its less quantifiable intangible assets to evaporate into the ether. Likewise, by leaning so heavily on a single economic measure, arts advocates give the government an easy way to dismiss their concerns. After all, if the corrugated cardboard industry returns $3.50 to the provincial treasury for each dollar invested in it, then it makes no sense to invest that dollar in the arts and culture industries in search of their comparatively paltry return of $1.36.

The decision to build criticisms of the Campbell government’s attack on arts and culture funding on such wobbly foundation also reflects a certain degree of tactical and strategic laziness. If there’s one community of interest in Vancouver that is capable of coming up with a compelling metaphor with which to attract attention and public support for their cause, surely it must be those who make a living making, distributing, and participating in arts and culture. Yet instead they decided to argue their case in literal, economic terms, using an argument that is both easily discredited and dismissed.

After over two weeks of properly funded events, installations, and performances, the hangover that’s in the offing for members of the arts and culture communities is going to be on the order of a post-Manischewitz binge. But like anyone with a serious hang-over, they need to spend their convalescence figuring out how to prevent another one. That won’t be accomplished by presenting the value of their contributions in monetary terms, as one economic equation among the many that the government has to consider each year. Instead, they need to apply their intelligence and creativity towards finding a better way of expressing both the intrinsic and extrinsic value of art and culture as well as the damage that the Campbell government is doing by suffocating its creation. Making the case in purely economic terms may ultimately do far more damage than good.

The blueprint

His name may not yet be up there alongside those of Lee Henderson, Kevin Chong, and Jen Sookfong Lee as part of Vancouver’s new generation of literati just yet, but Vancouver writer and comedian Charles Demers will be joining them soon enough. Demers’s latest book, Vancouver Special, ought to get him into group, but it also serves two other important purposes.

The first, a depiction of the city of Vancouver as he has come to know it, is the one Demers was most directly pursuing in writing the book. He fulfills that purpose, too, as the collection of essays about the city that the 29 year-old Demers has come to know and, yes, even love, that make up Vancouver Special is the most honest description of Vancouver that I’ve ever read. Beginning with the neighbourhoods that make up the city’s urban geography before moving on to the groups of people that populate it, Demers writes about the city with both an eye for the fine details and an aversion to the kind of earnest sentimentality that too often infests the work of people writing about their home towns that will make the book a must-read for anybody who wants to understand this city.

More important, perhaps, is the compelling case that Vancouver Special makes for the enduring relevance of the printed book. The release of the iPad and the war that it has triggered between Apple, Amazon, and the big book publishers has given the eBook a cultural prominence – and promise – that it might not deserve. Regardless of how aggressively they are priced and marketed, there are a few things that will make it impossible for the electronic book to ever enjoy the kind of widespread market penetration that its proponents might hope for it.

The most common comparison for the electronic book is, unsurprisingly, the electronic music file, a comparison that is abetted by the central role of Apple in the distribution model of both. The iPad, technophiles argue, will do to the book what the iPod did to the compact disc, as its technological sex appeal and next-gen interactivity will consign the printed book to the remainder bin of history. But this comparison misunderstands the nature of both the book and the song. Music is an intermediated process, and the iPod merely replaced the compact disc as the vessel by which it is transmitted just as the CD did the cassette tape, and so forth. The book doesn’t require a machine to enable the user to enjoy the product, which makes the iPad more luxury than necessity when compared to the iPod.

More important than the book’s immediacy is its durability. A well-written and well-received book can remain relevant for years, even decades, and while good music might live on in the environment of classic rock formats, it quickly acquires a dated and yellow smell. A better comparison might be with the newspaper and magazine, printed products which are destined in the near future for an existence defined entirely by bits and bytes. When it comes to the relevance of their content, a good newspaper might have a half-life of two days, while a top-drawer magazine might last a month or two. But after those points the currency of their content starts to degrade irreparably, leaving them destined, with the exception of the pathological hoarder, for the nearest recycling bin. The book, though, has a durability that these other things lack, and while a bad book can end up in the pulping pile as quickly as the Vancouver Province, a good one can last decades in the right care.

For bibliophiles like me, the printed book will always be the product of choice. I would rather own a good book and pay the price on its cover than receive the digital version for free. My demand for the printed book is, economically speaking, almost perfectly inelastic, in that no matter how low the price of an electronic version of the book I want to buy gets I still won’t purchase it in place of the printed version. The problem for publishers is that people like me are vastly outnumbered by the kinds of people who need a certain degree of enticement to buy the bound version of the book that they’re interested in reading. When the air war that’s currently taking place between Amazon and Apple switches to the ground phase of competing price cuts and bundling deals, publishers of printed books are going to have to be able to offer their customers something extra that makes the printed version an appealing choice. As I’ve said, they already enjoy some built-in advantages, but they have to more to make them count.

Demers’s book provides as good a blueprint as I’ve seen for the kind of value-added product that they need to deliver to those more reluctant readers. From its unconventional sizing and layout to its stark black and white colour scheme, the arresting photographs that are mixed into and alongside the text, and even the luxurious paper stock on which it’s printed, Vancouver Special is a book that’s worth owning. Of course, good writing and creative design isn’t the easiest thing in the world to find, and publishers interested in carving out their part of the book market going forward will have to go looking for both. But with Vancouver Special, Charlie Demers has shown that it can be done. Now, they just have to do it again, and again, and again.

The real price of gold

So far, it looks like the podium is owning Canada, rather than the other way around. Despite investing $110 million in the Own the Podium program, Canada’s athletes haven’t performed significantly better than they did in Torino in 2006 or Salt Lake City in 2002. From Mellisa Hollingsworth in the women’s skeleton to Charles and Francois Hamelin in men’s short track speed skating, not to mention the entire alpine skiing team, most of Canada’s high-profile athletes have come up well short of the expectations laid out so meticulously in CTV’s pre-event previews. Their animating narratives, be they about a comeback from injury, a redemption from past failures, or a long journey of hard work, have been left uncompleted by the uninspiring performances of their authors. Even the men’s hockey team has some work to do just to make it to the podium, with a must-win game against Germany and a tough quarterfinal match up against Russia standing between them and the medal round.

Of course, like most Olympic-related hysteria this angst over the medal count is overblown, given that most of Canada’s strength in these games is yet to come. Nate Silver, an American blogger and stats geek who predicted the outcome of both the American presidential primaries and the 2008 general election with greater accuracy than any professional polling firm in the country, issued a forecast on Wednesday that still has Canada finishing near the top of the medal count with 31 and leading with 13 gold medals. While that prediction has probably been revised downward after Canada’s disappointing performance in the men’s 1000 metre short track final and two man bobsleigh, it’s unlikely that when it’s all said and done Canada’s performance in these games will be looked on as a disappointment.

The more interesting question that is raised by our collective performance anxiety concerns the reasons why we fund high-level amateur sports in the first place. Even the most ardent Olympic advocate would concede that winning medals is not, in and of itself, a satisfactory return on the millions of dollars that are spent supporting the careers of lugers, bobsledders, mogul skiers, and other esoteric forms of athletic endeavour. The bigger picture, they argue, is about the promotion of healthy living and physical fitness, and the higher purpose of the medals our athletes win is to inspire future generations of athletes and Olympians, some of whom might even win medals of their own.

As Dan Gardner writes in the Ottawa Citizen, “Olympic athletes are the living embodiment of exercise, athleticism, and vigorous health. When everyone watches, everyone gets the message. Best of all, kids get the message. When somebody like Cindy Klassen wins gold, everybody cheers and the kids look up to them. The conclusion is obvious: Give athletes the money they need to own the podium and become role models and watch the country get skinny as a bear coming out of hibernation. This pitch has been effective. Governments everywhere funnel huge amounts of public money into the Olympics, through various channels, and one of the key rationales is the Olympics promotes healthy living.” In a country where our kids appear to be getting fatter by the second, that might seem like a worthwhile goal. The problem is that trying to encourage young people to trade their joysticks and the double cheeseburgers for a run in the park is like trying to get people to stop smoking by banning the production of ashtrays. If we want to encourage healthy lifestyles, there are far more efficient ways of doing it.

More importantly, there is the very real possibility that the inspirational effect of our athletes winning medals serves more to harm than help. A place on the podium, particularly if it’s supported by a compelling narrative – the first gold medal won by a Canadian athlete in Canada, for example – almost always leads to a fat endorsement contract. Those contracts aren’t with health food stores, either, but instead with companies like Coca Cola and McDonalds, conglomerates that badly need to look like they’re not poisoning children with mega-doses of saturated fat, sugar, and sodium. In the end, that moment of inspiration might do more harm than good to our overfed and under-exercised kids, who are more likely to be inspired to buy the Egg McMuffins that 2006 gold medalist Cindy Klassen has helped McDonald’s sell than sign up for speed skating lessons.

On its own, this wouldn’t much of an issue. After all, the government, be it federal, provincial, or municipal, wastes our money all the time. The money that’s spent subsidizing the careers of our high-performance amateur athletes is surely a less egregious expenditure than the millions that are spent each year by our elected officials on self-aggrandizing advertising campaigns or pork-barreling make-work projects. The million that are spent on these athletes only becomes conspicuous when it is compared the pittance that is allocated each year to our arts communities.

After all, while the Canadian taxpayer funds the careers of our high-performance athletes in the hope that they might one day win a medal and have their face featured in the next promotional campaign for the Quarter Pounder with Cheese, we do not extend the same courtesy to the thousands of writers, painters, musicians, and other artists trying to make a living in this county. Yes, there is the cultural Olympiad and the events attached to it that have created work and publicity for many artists, but it amounts to mere crumbs when compared to the loaves of bread on which our Olympic athletes have been nourished.

While the opening ceremonies alone cost $38 million, the British Columbia government will only be allocating $2.25 million in 2010-’11, an 88 per cent reduction from the $19.5 million that was paid out to arts organizations and agencies in 2008-’09. The disparity between what we’re paying for these Olympic games and what we’re spending on arts and culture is so great that it prompted Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, a Montreal artist whose searchlight art installation is one of the big hits of the cultural Olympiad, to describe his own project as “obscene.” “As I do this project and I learn more about the dire situation of the arts in B.C., I’m outraged by the complete lack of vision that has been expressed for after the Olympics,” he said in an interview with the Tyee.

That we’re willing to spend so much money on the careers of our lugers, speed skaters, and downhill skiers, and so little on those involved in the creation of art and culture, says a great deal about our collective priorities. One hopes that in time, perhaps with a more enlightened presence in either the federal or provincial level of government, the investment that’s made on our behalf in the arts and culture sector would be at least the same as the one that goes into the careers of our high-performance athletes. But that day is still a long, long way away. Right now, when it comes to how we fund arts, culture, and recreation in this country, we’re still behaving like a parent who buys a new car for one of his kids and lends the keys to his 1982 Toyota Corolla twice a week to the other.

The miracle on the creek

By the time the 2010 Winter Olympics are over the Athlete’s Village may be more famous than most of the people who stayed in it during the games. Stories about the host city, after all, will be as important to the small army of international journalists as those about the performances of the athletes from their respective countries, and there are few more obviously compelling than that of the Athlete’s Village, a gorgeous new waterfront community that embraces leading-edge approaches to green planning, architecture, and engineering. The recent announcement that the neighbourhood had achieved LEED platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council confirms its status as one of the most interesting new communities in the entire world. Yet for all of the Athlete’s Village’s charms, there might be an even more remarkable community on the other side of the Cambie Street Bridge, one whose quiet vitality offers daily testimony to the success of a social experiment that began more than thirty years ago.

It’s also an experiment whose lessons are in danger of being forgotten. False Creek, which will celebrate its 40th birthday in 2012, is a living museum to the ideas of Jane Jacobs. Its blend of mixed-tenant housing, diverse but complimentary architectural styles, and respect for public space have created a community unlike any other in Vancouver, and possibly all of Canada. Yet despite its success, the City of Vancouver and its partners in the provincial and federal government appear to have abandoned the principles that created it, as the uncertain future of the 252 planned units of affordable housing in the Olympic Athlete’s Village demonstrates. Mixed-income public housing, the most distinct feature of Old False Creek, is also its most unique, as governments move away from the vision of public housing that it represents and towards more market-oriented and developer-friendly approaches.

In fact, the Athlete’s Village would never have happened without that experiment and its success. Like the Athlete’s Village, the community of False Creek to its west was built on the ruins of Vancouver’s last remaining site of heavy urban industrial activity. But unlike the Athlete’s Village, Old False Creek was not granted a blank cheque the City of Vancouver and its partners at the provincial and federal levels of government, nor involved with major developers and corporate partners. Instead, it was a laboratory for a set of ideas most famously articulated by the late Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” a vision that believed urban development was capable of creating the conditions for social change.

That vision, which was outlined in the 1972 Official Development Plan, reads like a Jacobsian blueprint with the emphasis that it placed on mixed-tenant housing, creatively landscaped parklands, architectural diversity, publicly accessible walkways, live-aboard marinas, and a public market. That this vision for a diverse new community was to be realized on reclaimed industrial lands that ringed a heavily contaminated creek makes the much-discussed risks taken by the planners of the Woodward redevelopment seem positively pedestrian in comparison.

The big brains behind the Woodward’s redevelopment can only hope that their plans turn out as well as those that created False Creek have. By any conceivable measurement or metric, the neighbourhood is an overwhelming success, a model community that demonstrates the virtues of affordable housing and the impact that it can have on the lives of the people who live in it. In fact, False Creek is a powerful demonstration that affordable housing doesn’t have to be a blight, nor does it have to mark its resident with the scarlet letter of the government handout. Unlike Toronto’s Regent Park, a Stalinist nightmare that spent fifty years demonstrating precisely what affordable housing shouldn’t look like before it was mercifully given over to the wrecking ball, False Creek and the Jacobsian principles that informed its design give the people who live in it a chance to escape the cycle of poverty.

Yet despite the fact that levels of homelessness in Canada, and particularly here in British Columbia, continue to rise, the federal government has essentially abandoned its commitment to funding the kind of affordable housing projects that made False Creek such a resounding success. Instead, the feds have decided to take a piecemeal approach, funding a project here and a project there without any sense of overarching vision or design. As a result, they’ve failed to repeat the successes of False Creek or apply its lessons in other communities that might profit from them.

In a way, the Olympic Village is representative of this diminished commitment to affordable housing in Canada. Yes, it’s gorgeous, and yes, it conforms to the highest standards of sustainability and environmental awareness in the world. It is a model community, and one that will almost certainly be duplicated in communities around the world. But it’s a model community of a particular type, one that caters to the privileged, the wealthy, and the successful, and one whose reliance on the involvement of private-sector interests has resulted in a substantially reduced number of affordable housing units. As a result it will do very little to help those who need that help the most, and that’s a major missed opportunity. Vancouver already has more than enough glittering waterfront condominium developments, and will have more still after the northeast side of the creek is developed by Concord Pacific. What the city really needed was another community like the one on the west side of the Cambie Street Bridge, a 21st century interpretation of the values that produced False Creek. It didn’t get it, though, and for all the awards and accolades that the Olympic Athlete’s Village earns its failure to more fully integrate affordable housing into its ambition designs makes it a missed opportunity for the city and its residents.

Girl, you’ll be a woman soon. Or not.

For those who haven’t caught it yet, Gary Ross’s story about Vancouver in the latest edition of the Walrus is well worth a read. In it, he dissects both the popular clichés about and most popular misconceptions of the city he’s come to love. Near the end, Ross shares a story about visiting Vancouver as a teenager, and being encouraged by one his dad’s drunk union buddies to hit up a young woman who was working in the coffee shop that they were sitting in called the Blue Boy. Ross uses her a metaphor for the city itself, and it’s worth reprinting here.

“I spotted her at once, as would anyone with a Y chromosome,” Ross writes. “She was stunningly endowed, effortlessly lovely; notepad in hand, she was absorbed in the task of taking an order. I sat at the counter, trembling and dry mouthed. Only when she came over and handed me a menu, brushing aside a tendril of blond hair, did I realize she was not a young woman at all. She was a girl, scarcely older than I. Her name was Lila; her name tag said so.”

“Ever since that stay at the Blue Boy,” Ross continues, “through many years in Toronto and stints of living abroad and a permanent move to the West Coast in 1989, I’ve associated Lila with Vancouver — younger than she seems, less sophisticated than she might like, undeniably radiant, proud to be attracting attention but not quite sure how to deal with it, a little self-conscious as the first complications of maturity settle upon her. You can’t help but marvel at her good fortune, her beauty. You admire the earnestness of her endeavours. You envy the wealth of her possibilities. You wonder what she’ll become.”

Friends of mine know that I’ve often compared Vancouver to a pretty girl, though not in nearly as elegant and evocative a way as Ross does here. But I want to pull on Ross’s metaphor a bit, because I think it’s an interesting way of approaching the impact of the Olympics on Vancouver and its future as a city. To my eyes, Vancouver today is more like a woman who is about to turn 30, on the verge of a formative event in her life that will force her to make some choices that she may not ever have had to entertain. She’s still beautiful, but it isn’t as effortless as it once was. She has to make regular trips to the gym, put on the right kind of makeup, and spend a small fortune for a good haircut to look as good as she used to just by rolling out of bed. More importantly, that slowly fading beauty is forcing her to find something of substance within herself, a means of impressing others that doesn’t involve first – and second – glances. She has to learn to impress them with who she is, not what she looks like.

She’s got some work to do, too. While she’s still piling up beauty queen titles – Vancouver was again tabbed this year as the most “liveable” city in the world by the Economist – she’s doing it in contests that only assess how good she looks in an evening gown and a swimsuit. The concept of liveability that magazines like the Economist are writing about is assessed in an economic vacuum, without any consideration paid to the possibility that a good job and a decent are both needed to enjoy it. If those criteria were to be included, it’s unlikely that Vancouver would rank anywhere near the top of the list. After all, while Vancouver may have lovely weather and an unparalleled selection of Bikram yoga classes, when it comes to the kinds of jobs that are available it is scarcely any better than Moose Jaw or Saskatoon.

A closer look at the Economist rankings, for example, reveals that no consideration was paid to economic concerns, an ironic choice given the name of the magazine conducting the assessment. The ranking scored each city from 0-100 on 30 factors spread across five areas: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. The Economist’s rankings correlate with, and actually draw upon, the data from another quality of life index known as the Mercer Quality of Living Survey, but it too virtually ignores economic concerns and focuses instead on safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability, and public transportation. Judging by the criteria on which these studies depend, it appears that their understanding of liveability is informed by the notion that money is neither an object nor a concern.

This is a significant oversight, if one is operating under the assumption that people have to earn a living in these supposedly liveable cities. After all, while Vancouver’s natural assets are among the best in the world, its economic ones are less than spectacular. According to the most recent Census results from 2006, the median salary in Vancouver is $62,900, less than that of Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, and St. John’s, to name just a few. That lowly figure is the result of Vancouver’s status as a branch plant economy, one whose landscape is defined by regional offices rather than company headquarters. Only HSBC and Vancity have their head offices in Vancouver, while its stunted industrial sector employs only 98,000 people. Even the once vaunted film industry has begun to die off, with productions heading both to Los Angeles in the south and Toronto in the east in search of more lucrative tax incentives. Yes, there’s Lululemon, Coast Mountain Sports, Electronic Arts, and a growing biotech sector, but these success stories don’t create nearly enough high-quality jobs to sustain a local population of almost 3 million people.

People are still willing to take our girl out for dinner, though, and they have yet to balk at the price. After a hiccup in 2008, real-estate resumed its seemingly unstoppable rise, with the average detached single family home again approaching $1 million. Paired together, these two trends – rising real-estate prices, stagnating wages – have created a dangerous situation for local residents who lack access to generous trust funds or sizeable inheritances. According to a 2008 RBC report, it would take 75 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s median income of $60,000 to afford an average two-storey home, which carried a price tag of $619,892. In downtown Vancouver, the epicentre of real-estate unrealism, the skew between incomes and housing costs is even greater. The gulf between the haves and the have-nots when it comes to owning real-estate has never been bigger in Vancouver, or more dangerous for those brave – or stupid – enough to try to make the leap between the two categories.

As if to underscore the perverse nature of the relationship between what people earn in Vancouver and what they pay for their homes, the city of Vancouver recently explored the possibility of permitting lane way housing as a way of creating more affordable housing. “It is creating affordability,” city councillor Raymond Louie argued in a 2008 phone interview, saying that increasing the supply of rental housing will soften demand and potentially lower rents. “It is our preference that those who are working in the city and helping to build the city are able to remain in the city.” Yes, that’s right; it has become acceptable to think, and to argue, that the only way people working in Vancouver can afford to live here is by allowing the creation of upscale shantytowns in the city’ s alleys.

There are only three possible outcomes to this incongruity between what people earn in Vancouver and what it costs to live here. Despite Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ambitious Green Capital Initiative a significant increase in the median income level in Vancouver, one that would allow the average family to buy an average home without having to sell a kidney on the black market to afford the down payment, seems the least likely. Vancouver is still a service-oriented economy, and it will take more than one government program to change that. In contrast, a substantial drop in real-estate prices seems like the most likely outcome, given the ongoing troubles in the global finance and equity markets, the possibility of another leg down in the American housing market, and the certainty of a substantial increase in mortgage rates here at home. While condo flippers and 5 per cent downers would suffer, the average Vancouver resident would probably welcome a return to more realistic pricing levels.

The third possible outcome is also the most dangerous, but it’s the also the one that is being actively promoted by the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. If real-estate prices continue to rise and wages continue to stagnate, a meaningful life in Vancouver might become an economic impossibility for an increasing number of its residents. Downtown, with its multi-million dollar condominiums and world class restaurants (translation: no main course under $25) would become the exclusive domain of the international jet-set, an island of pleasure and leisure from which Vancouver’s less privileged residents would be implicitly excluded. The economy, meanwhile, would be focused on serving the interests of those privileged few in any number of service-oriented industries. But like an aging beauty queen, the death of the city’s middle class would create ever widening cracks in Vancouver’s social and cultural infrastructure that would have to be papered over by a series of decreasingly effective cosmetic procedures. Ultimately, a city that trades solely on its looks will end up looking like Joan Rivers, a comically taut fraud utterly divorced from the demands of its own biological realities.

It’s time for Vancouver to grow up, time for it to look past the natural assets with which it has been blessed. The Olympics represented an opportunity for that to happen, for the city to re-imagine itself as a city in the truest sense of the world and reveal that new look to the world. Instead, Vancouver decided to buy a new outfit and put on a new shade of eyeliner. In treating the Olympics as an opportunity to reinforce the city’s image as a lifestyle-oriented, tourist friendly pleasure centre, Vancouver has missed an important opportunity for real growth. There’s still time for the maturation process to take hold, but it had better happen soon. The wealth of possibilities that Gary Ross wrote about won’t be around forever, a reality to which anybody on the wrong side of 30 can attest.