The blossoms are out — time for some spring cleaning. Here are some quick updates on earlier columns:
• In lieu of 66th birthday gifts, former Victoria councillor Chris Coleman asked people to perform acts of kindness. Whoever wowed him the most, he said, would win a trophy he called the Gudonya Cup.
Among the scores of entries, someone bought a week’s worth of groceries for a single parent with two children. Another vowed to host a tea for 15 seniors who live alone, and a woman with multiple sclerosis promised to cook and share a meal with a friend who helps her.
Coleman chose C. Anne McIntyre, who recruited her two teenagers in putting together a package — clothes, food, toiletries — for a street-entrenched man she sees now and then. What really got Coleman was her handwritten note to the man: “We just want to let you know that we think of you and hope you have a good day. Often I drive by you on the way to work and wonder how you are.” It went on in that vein. Good for her. Good for Coleman.
• Unfortunately, there’s not much to report in the case of Dan Thanh Vo, the man whose Ontario family thought he was dead, but who in fact had been on the streets of Victoria for 7 1/2 years, living with untreated schizophrenia.
Vo is now housed in Victoria but remains blocked from returning to Ontario by a wrinkle in the rules on air travel. Like many homeless people, he doesn’t have the kind of ID that will let him board a plane. Unlike others, though, that problem can’t be remedied by digging up a birth certificate. Since Vo was born in Vietnam, he needs to show evidence of Canadian citizenship, and getting such documents can take several months. Even expedited requests take four weeks to fill. People have offered to drive him to Ontario, but there is concern that such a journey would be too arduous for him.
• The beach log that some kind soul carved into a bench at Ross Bay last year, the one that got washed out to the saltchuck by this winter’s storms? It washed back in, but now rests upside down against the walkway.
• The provincial government’s approval last week of Surrey’s plan to ditch the RCMP in favour of a municipal police force will have fallout on Vancouver Island. We just don’t know what it is yet.
Staffing B.C.’s Mountie detachments is like playing a never-ending game of dominos. Unlike their counterparts in municipal departments, Mounties expect to be moved from time to time. That includes being shipped to less-attractive destinations known as limited-duration posts where they serve a specified time — two years, say, or five — on the understanding that the force will repost them once that time is up.
It’s a complicated process compounded by a chronic shortage of cops, and now compounded further by uncertainty over what will happen when the province’s largest detachment, with 840 of the roughly 7,000 sworn RCMP members in B.C., simply disappears. There’s no timeline for the transition, and no indication of how many Mounties will patch over to the new force.
Don’t necessarily look for those leaving Surrey to fill the vacancies on the Island. “A lot of them are going to say: ‘I want to go back home,’ ” says Brian Sauvé, president of the National Police Federation, the Mounties’ union. That might mean Saskatchewan, say, or Nova Scotia.
Sauvé is far from certain that the Surrey transition will go ahead at all, not once it becomes clear how much it will cost to set up and maintain a new force. (If you’re a Mountie and have the choice between Surrey, where your house cost $1 million, and Campbell River, Duncan or the Comox Valley, where homes are half the price, how much more will Surrey have to pay to keep you from moving?) “There are still a bunch of red lights on this road,” Sauvé says.
• Further to an earlier piece on the dangers of pets inadvertently eating drugs, this came from Mariann Malvet, a Willis Point woman who regularly walks her dog Lulu on nearby wilderness trails. “Twice in the past year — first in July, most recently in February — she has ingested something that has resulted in seizure-like symptoms which have led us to the vet. The first time it was thought to be an opiate, the second time marijuana. The experience is traumatic for the dog and the owner, not to mention extremely expensive. The veterinarians have indicated that it is a very common occurrence.”
• And finally: You might have read Tuesday’s update on the small plane that crash-landed in a Blenkinsop Valley field after losing its propeller. The prop was found in a backyard near Mount Doug on Sunday.
Note that this isn’t the first time that end of Saanich has seen foreign objects fall from the sky. Back in 1942, during the Second World War, five unarmed practice bombs were somehow dropped by a Royal Canadian Air Force plane on a training flight from the Patricia Bay Airport. One bomb plunged into a house on Haliburton Road. Three others buried themselves deep in a field. The fifth slammed through the roof and into the kitchen sink of a Cordova Bay Road home as the woman who lived there washed the dishes.
The Cordova Bay Blitzkrieg claimed no casualties, though records show the RCAF paid the homeowner $163.01 to compensate for losses that included a sink strainer, three saucepans and a six-inch double boiler.
