News item: Victoria’s downtown business association removes posters reading “Chill, we could all be in Moose Jaw” after the Saskatchewan city takes offence. The signs were part of a campaign urging people to park downtown.
On behalf of Victoria, I wish to apologize to Moose Jaw from the bottom of my heart, or at least the heart of my bottom.
When we poked fun at you with those downtown parking posters, we did not mean to single out Moose Jaw as being a bleak, frostbitten, featureless place to live.
No, no, no. What you have to understand is that by “Moose Jaw” we meant “all of Saskatchewan.”
And by “Saskatchewan” we mean “everywhere on the wrong side of the Rockies.”
In fact, we also look down our noses at Vancouver, Kelowna, Prince George (the city, not the baby) — all of Eastern Canada, really, which we define as anything past Tsawwassen (Tsawwassen tsucks). It’s why we dug the big moat between us and them, to keep the riff-raff out.
For we in Victoria believe we live in the most special place in Canada, if not all of creation. Retirees flock here. So do tourists. There are angels in heaven who dream of buying a house on Ten Mile Point. We tell each other this — modestly, repeatedly and loudly — while burning our mortgage notices to stay warm in the homes we can’t afford to heat. (Ha ha, those stupid Moose Jaw people, only paying an average of $202,000 for a house, having to figure out what to do with all that extra disposable income.)
But in poking fun at Moose Jaw, we broke the rule. The prettiest girl at the dance is not supposed to acknowledge that she is the prettiest girl. And certainly, when told she’s a rotten dancer or has lousy parking, she isn’t supposed to respond with “Chill, you could be dancing with that girl with the funny name.” It’s bad manners.
Not only that, but it risks resentment. (Echoes of Kelly LeBrock: “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”) While the rest of Canada knows Victoria is lovely, that doesn’t mean they have to love us. (Remember when Victoria got buried in the Blizzard of ’96? Alberta declared a civic holiday.) Tick them off, they’re likely to key our car after the dance or force a pipeline to our coast.
As it is, other Canadians are not as smitten with us as we are with ourselves. Victoria might think of itself as a beautiful princess, but others see a tinfoil hat where the tiara is supposed to be. For this is how others view us: Old World stuffy or hipster pretentious one moment, chemtrails crazy the next.
That’s the prevailing view of B.C. in general. As one of two token British Columbians working in the newsroom of the Regina Leader Post in the 1980s, half my time was spent trying to dispel the notion that our province was nothing but a refuge for burned-out acid heads and edge-of-the-world crackpots, the place where the rest of Canada shovelled its flakes in winter.
Alas, one day as I was self-righteously bleating in our defence, the news wire spat out Keith Baldrey’s Vancouver Sun story about a chaotic confrontation between fundamentalist Christians and a ragtag collection of protesters — including enviros, pagans and a Sufi — who invaded the new prayer room at Bill Vander Zalm’s legislature. (“Tolerance is ignorance,” bellowed a fundamentalist as a variety of gods were invoked to, among other things, fight uranium mining. “I heard something about Buddha here, and I didn’t like it.”) Basically, just another day at the circus.
After that, no one took me seriously in Regina, though one guy did keep sidling up to quietly ask if I knew where he could buy some mushrooms.
It was also in Regina that my wife met a cab driver who had lived in Vancouver. He explained what brought him back to Saskatchewan: “I got up one morning, looked at those damned mountains on one side and that ruddy ocean on the other, and said: ‘I’ve got to go home.’ ”
Home being where the heart is — and if you poke fun at somebody’s home, don’t be surprised if he pokes you back.
