A commentary by a Victoria resident with a lengthy resumé of community involvement.
The recent commentary about the condition of Victoria streets is a message from a vanished world when Henry or Ralph stood on the front lawn, watering the shrubbery with a hose, waving to and exchanging smiles and a friendly greeting with his neighbours as they walked by.
That was a world of presumed social order. Nobody littered. The streets gleamed. The homeless, if there were any, invisibly clung to life across the tracks or the bridge, recipients of Christian charity. Everyone else collected a paycheque.
You know the rest of this story, even if it is now bearded with the moss of ancient myth.
Some folks in Canada (especially in Victoria, I suspect) still pay allegiance to that Canada, when shopping was a downtown function — remember Eaton’s? — and are reduced to shock and bluster by all the crapzola of our modern age.
That Victoria is gone. That Canada is gone. That world is gone.
Instead, we have a kid for a prime minister, a faltering national economy, a thousand homeless sitting in commandeered motels or on Pandora and on Douglas, mere steps from the vanished Eaton’s, in a downtown under economic threat (you might, since the time of provincial de-instituionalization and the scourge of fentanyl, call the homeless today’s social potholes).
And coterminously, the world is roiling with violence and the environment, in spite of happy-face corporate promises, is planning to render us extinct.
These are not happy or promising times. They are times filled with risk at every level, along with the threat of widespread social chaos (trust me, the worst is yet to come). Local government is stretched (a nice word for incapacitated) in its efforts to meet all needs at once (and under the circumstances doing a damn good job).
Triple property taxes and the city could get a lot more done, including roadwork. Chances of that happening? The word “zero” comes readily to mind.
Peter Zeihan, economic demographer, makes the timely point: “A lot of people are waiting for prices to get back to the way they were five years ago. That’s not in the math.”
And in the meantime drivers have to run over some cracks and wrinkles in the street pavement?
Aw. Gosh and golly.
