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LAUTENS: The City of North Van is deaf to district's mating call

Amalgamation. A word that sends the blood coursing through the jolly old veins of every North Shorean, eh? Oh, stop snoring.

Amalgamation. A word that sends the blood coursing through the jolly old veins of every North Shorean, eh?

Oh, stop snoring. If you do a Rip Van Winkle turn, you can wake up in 20 years and it’ll be back in North Vancouverites’ half-opened eyes again. If you missed the premiere, catch the revival.

Should the annoyingly two North Vancouvers, city and district (how stupid that they weren’t given distinctly different names at the start in 1912), ever marry, it’ll be the nastiest shotgun wedding on record. The probable officiate being the minister of municipal affairs.

The putative groom, the City of North Vancouver, is clearly a carefree bachelor. Taut, tight, lusty night life. The plaintive bride offers luscious physical attractions including a grand dowry, but the guy resembles the dumb, libido-deficient male lead in countless movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age – he wakes up to the dangling goodies of the female star only in the last five minutes, after she’s relentlessly chased him for 90.

Tired of this metaphor, or whatever it is? So am I.

The prosaic fact is that the CNV is deaf to the mating call of the DNV. The CNV has tidy finances, the DNV mostly untapped resources needing big service outlays – and, at a guess, most of its citizens prefer the quiet country life to merging with a North Shore extension of downtown Vancouver. A mixed blessing. There’s an element of the time-dishonoured motive of marrying for money. (Damn, how did I slip back into this marriage parallel?)

I summon up the shade of Derrick Humphreys, a colourful gent – almost a stage Edwardian Tory Englishman – always impeccably dressed in a white suit. He had the rare if not unique experience of serving as a CNV alderman and later mayor of West Vancouver. Humphreys backed amalgamation, then as now citing the logic of ending duplicate services.

Aha, the human factor. This logic was not lost on the CNV fire department, which strongly rejected it: A merger of two departments threatened its seniority list. It wasn’t alone. When Humphreys ran for mayor in 1961, he wrote in his memoirs, “I found myself running against every established interest in the city. Liberal Bill Angus didn’t beat me. The fire department did!”

Raise your hands and cross your hearts, those who would gladly sacrifice their jobs and status in the crusade to crush the evil of duplication and march in the triumphant parade of efficiency.

I hear those who engineered 1907’s divorce of the CNV and the DNV shouting from the grave: “Let no man join together what we have split asunder!”

• • •

Democracy in West Vancouver:

The defining moment at the Park Royal twin-towers zoning application was when the senior community planner stated that, over the previous 10 years, Lions Gate Bridge traffic declined 2.95 per cent. Disbelieving laughter, scattered jeers.

Mayor Michael Smith reacted as if crushing the rabble seeds of the French Revolution. He sternly silenced the mostly grey-haired, earnest citizenry, lectured about being “disrespectful,” and the hearing – manipulated by the perfectly rule-obeying and Larco/Lalji allies who had sped to enroll on the speakers list and dominated the first 15-odd speakers – resumed its impeccably respectful course.

Two of Smith’s favourite words: Mischievous. Nay-sayers. There was indeed someone in the room who was mischievous – toward hard-won, imperfect democracy, not special-interest groups eager to bend the eternal knee to big, big international money. And someone who was a nay-sayer – toward the free speech of ordinary people, squashed for making a peep in the very chamber of local democracy.

That someone is the mayor of West Vancouver. I try to make allowances: Smith’s serious fall last year, and/or ruminations on possible political retirement, may weigh on him.

No surprise that Coun. Mary-Ann Booth was tight with the mayor in this preposterous humbug rationale for alleviating the Metro housing crisis – for people much richer than I, a practising capitalist though of the naïve sort who believe in some measure of a level playing field, which the Lalji family adherents of the Aga Khan most egregiously don’t play on.

Not unexpected that Coun. Craig Cameron voted for the project; a disappointment that Coun. Nora Gambioli joined the 4-3 majority. High praise for Couns. Peter Lambur, Christine Cassidy and especially council veteran Bill Soprovich in rejecting the nostrums and the dollar signs.

• • •

My logic was sound but bombed: Coun. Booth didn’t commission the choice-for-mayor poll noted here May 8. Agent y3Dp8W gloated in alleging that it was sponsored by “a friend” (his quotation marks) of Mark Sager. At this writing Sager hasn’t answered my query.

• • •

Sad report and warning: At 5:15 Wednesday morning a coyote was seen boldly walking down West Van’s Marine Drive near the Cypress shopping centre, carrying a cat.

• • •

“Ha – another drunken newspaperman!” No, after nearly three hours sitting at council’s May 7 meeting I lurched standing up, caught by kind hands, and faced the melancholy truth far worse than a curable nip: I need the armrest of sofa or theatre chair to hoist my rebellious body.

rtlautens@gmail.com