Ignore terrorism in Vancouver – exploding home prices. Forget the media watch on Justin Trudeau’s fading honeymoon. Pass by Wall Street to Your Street, where real people, even most on-shore West Vancouverites, live. I stopped dead at a store’s scrawled sign: Cauliflower 2/$4.
Surely a mis-scrawl? Cauliflowers were going, or staying put on the shelves, at an astonishing $5 before vaulting to an unpurchasable six and a half in my previous supermarket check.
Are they, um, ageing, I queried the checkout lady? She was visibly insulted. Through the cello they seemed in strapping good health. I seized my prize and hastened home.
Where my wife pronounced them perfectly beautiful. Small, but so is a ballet dancer’s waist. My life had not been lived in vain after all.
This epiphany occurred at tiny Farm to Table in the 1400-block Marine Drive. Assigned to loftier household purchases with commas in them, I will now examine this bright store’s offerings more closely. Usually I’m engaged in discouraging my lame dog’s impulse to leave his signature in the immediate area.
Safeway is alertly promising, in handsome full-page print ads with grapes shyly peeking from one corner and broccoli from the one opposite, to begin an official assault on produce prices this very day. For the sweet of tooth, last weekend Safeway reduced by a stunning 75 per cent (to $2.37!) its already bargain-priced, seriously under-the-radar dark or mint Delecto chocolates, 285-gram box – and, an added big plus, made in Canada (by Ganong of St. Stephen, New Brunswick).
If you aren’t rushing out to stock up Delectos without finishing this stick of type, don’t say you weren’t alerted.
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While the sunny mood is still on a roll: My wife and I were recovering from a grand Robbie Burns dinner in Victoria – where the murmur was that the preciously ladled-out wild haggis might be put on the endangered list, and farmed on the farmed salmon model a possibility.
With fine coincidence, an upbeat gent on the ferry who ambled by to drool over my 30-year-old English car turned out to be the comedian Johnny Bagpipes, heading for a gig. How can anyone make the bagpipes funnier – the only musical instrument that can’t be accompanied by another, except the drums, competing to drown out the other? Maybe an old English car is even funnier. Getting it started can be an amusing skit itself.
Inventively, Johnny’s “business card” is a guitar pick bearing his website address. And by the way, beware the wild haggis: It has more bite than several drams of scotch.
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Turning to what is deemed serious business: Douglas Todd is a large, under-recognized Vancouver Sun asset. His deep research can confound or confirm so-called conventional wisdom – such as his recent compelling study showing that far more aboriginal murder victims are male than female (71 per cent to 29 per cent).
Who knew? Women’s priorities, intersecting with the mantra of historical white shame, have suppressed this information.
And this too: 92 per cent of female aboriginals are killed by family or acquaintances, only eight per cent by strangers. These numbers illuminate the absurdity of the politicized demand for an inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women, a colossal waste of time and treasure.
Safe, accessible bus service on the Highway of Tears would help reduce these terrible murders more than a dozen inquiries. But that would take away the real inquiry objective – political theatre driven by the ideological momentum of the “progressive” elites, certain to affix blame on colonialism, white racism etc. – and of course do nothing to lessen murder within families.
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More humbug: The official Canadian, recognizable by his peculiar arm – bent from slapping his own back, as modelled by our dear Ottawa leaders – is compassionate, welcoming, warm toward suffering Middle Eastern refugees.
Here’s a typically disabusing reality: In West Van two doctors, an orthopedic surgeon and an anesthesiologist, both settled in Canada for a couple of years, can’t work in their valuable, needed professions – without returning to school for five years.
Yes, our provincial walls and protectionist unions by any name deserve consideration. But they don’t sit well with our pieties.
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West Van Coun. Christine Cassidy thinks an aside in my last piece about the proposed Centre for Art, Architecture & Design gave a false impression about her stand, which is:
“I will/would not vote for any CAAD building that occupies the John Lawson parking lot. I will not vote for any CAAD building that occupies the waterfront. I will not vote for any CAAD building, in any location, that cannot provide a viable business model. I do not want the taxes of the citizens of West Vancouver used to support a ‘white elephant.’”
Can you hear my shrieks of agreement?
Former Vancouver Sun columnist Trevor Lautens writes every second Friday on politics and life with a West Vancouver bias. He can be reached via email at [email protected].
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