Serious things are occurring all around us. Forget them. Today this space celebrates wonderful, sometimes slightly eccentric, West Vancouverites.

Speaking of forgetfulness, remember the Sedin twins? Professional athletes, playing for what’s-its-name? They are cream-puff sissies compared to a world-beating West Van athlete whose name is not on everybody’s lips.

She – yes, a female – walked into the West Vancouver Aquatic Centre last week proudly showing off 12 medals which she’d just won in Finland. Nothing new. She holds 17 track-and-field world records and 650-odd gold medals. You may not live to collect, but if you find a sucker, bet that Henrik and Daniel Sedin won’t come within a 5.8foot long jump (that’s her best) of Olga Kotelko’s experts baffling athleticism if they reach her age – 93.

Everything about this five foot-nothing retired teacher stretches credulity. In early days she did yoga and such. Ran. Started slow-pitch softball at 70 and retired at 75. Didn’t even begin track and field, and the road to all those world records in her age category, until 77.

Olga’s body has been carefully studied – muscle cells, neurons, all that – at the Montreal Neurological Institute, associated with the famed Wilder Penfield. “She is one of the world’s great athletes,” gasped the New York Times, and if you can’t trust the paper that boasts “All the news that’s fit to print,” whom can you trust?

The Times pictured Olga throwing the shot-put. Her record is 16.1 feet. I couldn’t throw my empty gin bottles that far.

. . .

Jane Thornthwaite is Liberal MLA for North Vancouver-Seymour, but I warmly make her an honourary West Vancouverite for her concern for animals.

This week Thornthwaite introduced her private member’s bill, Standards of Care for Breeders of Companion Animals, aimed at shutting down puppy and kitty mills while protecting legitimate breeders and pet owners.

Such a good cause, yet the government’s coincident Bill 24, arising from last year’s slaughter of some 50 sled dogs (the man who allegedly carried out the slayings was charged recently, but should culpability stop there?) has run into opposition from the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The BCSPCA protests that the bill’s provisions will burden it with $300,000 annually in new costs. West Van citizens David Burn and Pat Hindley have mounted opposition too.

Thornthwaite’s bill is separate from Bill 24, but concerning the latter bill she’s heard “from many animal lovers and animal welfare groups requesting the government instigate an independent appeal process in order to alleviate concerns about the SPCA being viewed as enforcer, judge, and jury on animal seizures and dispositions.”

Even compassion for animals isn’t immune from controversy.

. . .

I think L.C. can safely be assumed to back Thornthwaite’s bill. She showed up on WV’s great Ambleside Beach dog walk proudly bearing – what was it, a babe in swaddling clothes?

Nope, the tiniest of puppies, more adorable than any dog but mine (and yours), which she’d “rescued” by purchasing it from one of those how-much-is-that-doggy-in-the-window stores. That’s heart.

. . .

There’s been a flood of dog stories along the beach walk recently.

I count this a first. I was resting my bones on a park bench when a dog approached, jumped up, and before even being welcomed stood on my lap, studying the world. All with utter nonchalance, not craving a pat or a scratch.

It may not qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, but I’ve never encountered such a canine. His owner, though, assured me that he often cosies up to strangers like that.

She also told a story that, with variants, you hear often among dog people. A woman she knew had a small dog that needed extensive medical help. Like, $16,000 worth.

The owner paid. And the dog died.

Regrets? No, the owner declared, she’d have mortgaged her house to save that dog.

Love like that.

. . .

Dog people open up more than other people. About their dogs. About themselves.

Another owner fell into conversation with me. In no way was she weird, fanatical, saying anything unusual. Until she remarked that dogs are angels.

Not angelic. Not metaphorical angels. Not figure-of-speech angels. Angels. You know. Sent from heaven. That kind. The real McCoy, as we used to say.

The novelist Robertson Davies once wrote that people can believe in something that they don’t believe in 24 hours a day.

I believed her.

. . .

A couple came along the dog walk with one of those brown-and-black, coarsehaired, hound-y type dogs. You know the breed: The Standard Mutt.

The woman explained it was a rescue dog. It took five years to socialize him. Had to be kept muzzled. During that time, she added, it had bitten someone only once.

“A brigadier-general,” she smiled.

Guess there wasn’t a lawyer or journalist handy.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

I take pride in my simplistic attitude toward legalizing marijuana. I’m against it. Better know that immediately if you plan to read on.

I identify those who favour legalization as well-educated, privileged people, or deluded fools. Not that those groups don’t intermarry.

Oh, not to injure the feelings of hypocrites by leaving them out. For ably describing the hoisting on their own petards – anyone know what a petard is, without consulting Oxford? – of four classic examples of this sub-species of mankind, I make ten thousand obsequious bows to Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin.

Aided by his large, well-financed research team, Pete gleefully identified as first-class hypocrites the four former British Columbia attorneys-general – like four ex-Vancouver mayors of similar trajectory – who were draft-dodgers in the war to legalize marijuana when they held office, but now emerge as akin to the 99% of prominent Frenchmen who were in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

Let us name these latecomers.  They are Colin Gabelmann, Ujjal Dosanjh, Graeme Bowbrick and Geoff Plant. (On other matters I admire two of the above and excuse a third for his brief tenure.)

They have jointly written a letter to the present premier and leader of the opposition. It begins: “As former B.C. Attorneys General we are fully aware that British Columbia lost its war against the marijuana industry many years ago …”

As Pete notes (damn, I’ll have to split my fee with him), the operative phrase here is “many years ago.” But the record shows this quartet never shouldered arms with the pro-marijuana liberators. They’ll be there, though, when the supposedly troglodyte defenders of the status quo raise the white flag and the legal stoning party begins, as seems likely. Brings to mind the delightfully reproachful old New Orleans song, “Sent for you yesterday, here you come today.”

Obviously the wars on murder, stealing, child abuse, pornography, political fibbing and such have been waged long before there were calendars, and no victory in sight either. Only the war on marijuana – the weed of the generation now in power, coincidentally – is hopeless, lost.

It is impertinent of me to weigh the fashionable opinions of several old pols, most of them science-challenged, against someone who actually knows what he’s talking about. UBC’s Dr. Pat McGeer is a world-class neuroscientist who has spent a lifetime studying the brain, as opposed to those baffling it.

McGeer, who was also a brilliant cabinet minister – Allan Fotheringham opined that he got more ideas before breakfast than the rest of the (Bill Bennett) cabinet in a month – unloaded  on former mayors Larry Campbell, Mike Harcourt, Sam Sullivan and Philip Owen last November when they too publicly backed legalization of  pot.

Wrote McGeer: “British Columbians should firmly reject their entreaties to legalize marijuana. They wish to enhance its availability on the grounds that it will bring revenue to the city and is harmless.

“Just say no. It is not a harmless agent. Our brain research laboratory at UBC published a series of papers in the 1970s specifically demonstrating brain damage from cannabis.

“I was invited to testify before a U.S. congressional committee on our findings. Three of my scientists ignored those findings. As marijuana users, they became incapable of designing and executing experiments. They were the only three I have lost in more than 50 years of managing young neuroscientists.

“I have never been able to understand why anybody would be so foolish as to monkey with the biochemistry of their most precious organ, their brain.”

The invulnerable – through privilege, family influence and support, appropriate genes, luck, or a belated flash of common sense – largely survived the big smoke-in of the 1960s.  The vulnerable didn’t. The issue came as close to me as I would ever want, and hardened my conviction. Shame, you well-stuffed ex-politicians, media people, academics, professional counsellors and others of their self-interested and in many cases Johnny-come-lately caste.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

GRAHAM James. Anyone in the land who doesn’t know who James is?

Now try this. Catherine Carlson. Who dat?

Carlson is the Manitoba judge who gave pedophile and former coach James two years in prison on concurrent sentences for hundreds of sexual assaults of two then-teenaged hockey players, Theo Fleury and Todd Holt. The Crown stayed charges involving a third, Greg Gilhooly.

That paragraph contains three searing indictments of our justice system – which has fallen into huge disrepute with “ordinary” and not-so-ordinary Canadians.

One, the sentence. Under the system’s fun-with-inflationary-figures, sentences are reduced for time spent in jail awaiting trial (commonly accredited as double time, an unlegislated practice Ottawa dropped but is still being followed by some courts), and from one-third to two-thirds off in prison because, well, that’s become the Canadian convention. So James, who earlier served about 18 months of a 3½-year sentence on similar charges, is likely to be back on the streets in November. Scandalous.

Two, concurrent sentences. Canadians smugly scoff at U.S. consecutive sentences like 176 years for conviction on multiple charges. Sounds right to me. In Canada, 10 convictions for, say, sexual assault draw 10 concurrent sentences. One rape, one term. Ten rapes, same term. Is this bananas or what?

Third, staying – i.e., not proceeding with – charges when similar charges have been brought in similar cases. So monster Willie Pickton, who boasted of killing 50 women, was tried and convicted of killing “only” six. The anger of the victims’ families is understandable.

So, if there’s such a thing as a citizen’s arrest, I hereby arrest Judge Catherine Carlson for, oh, bringing the administration of justice into disrepute, something like that.

And I immediately leap to her defence. All the above are just business as usual in our courts. Carlson had no bleeding-heart illusions about James as a cunning master manipulator. In her decision she said: “Mr. James could essentially do what he wanted to do to (his victims), and could rely on their compliance and silence, because he controlled whether they would get the chance at what they really wanted or would have their dreams” – to play major-league hockey – “crushed.”

No, one judge shouldn’t carry the can for the entire Canadian court system. That system needs a profound shakeup – and its lordly claim to independence doesn’t wash any more with a public that feels profoundly betrayed by sentencing travesties.

The closed shop of the justice system’s union by any name permits stunning costs (discouraging civil action even when the case has merit), the fee-spinning adjournments so readily granted, the multi-year delays that can lead to dropping of serious charges because the accuseds’ rights are compromised.

Justice is too important to be left to lawyers. But, that lightly said, who else can help reform the system? With impressive courage, Geoff Plant, a practising lawyer and highly regarded former B.C. attorney-general, wrote a superb piece in the March 20 Vancouver Sun, a must-read for citizens.

Plant’s hook, as journalists would say, was a speech last year by David Johnston to the Canadian Bar Association. In a thoughtful review of the social contract, the Governor General – the Queen’s representative in Canada, need reminding? – stated that the administration of the court system “cries out for improvement.”

Last month B.C. Finance Minister Kevin Falcon, plainly, and Liberal MLA Kevin Krueger, provocatively, criticized the court system.

Whereupon Thomas Finch, Robert Bauman and Thomas Crabtree, chief judges of B.C.’s Appeal, Supreme and provincial courts respectively, issued a joint statement that a Sun editorial noted “has been described as haughty and arrogant” – not that the Sun would sign on to language so very, you might say, injudicious.

Plant – whose piece appeared two days before the Sun editorial – was surprised that the three would agree on anything, let alone a rare joint statement. His summation is quietly explosive: “There is not the slightest suggestion anywhere in their carefully worded statement that there is a problem with the justice system. . . . They have chosen instead to read us a lecture on judicial independence.”

Reader, this is more grave than any one court case, even the most heinous.

. . .

Speaking of the Sun again: How soon we forget.

A few weeks ago the paper, introducing its interesting 100th anniversary series, ran a photo of Simma Holt and McClelland & Stewart late publisher Jack McClelland, holding Simma’s book Terror in the Name of God – which got a prized front-page review in the New York Times book section.

But lined up with them was a third person, unidentified.

Who? Why, top Social Credit cabinet minister Robert Bonner, W.A.C. Bennett’s attorney-general. Newsrooms used to keep an old hand around to identify such past matters. But eventually they too die out and are forgotten.

. . .

The show must go on. And it will. The sadly defunct Playhouse Theatre will have one last hurrah, of sorts, when its final play of 2011-12, award-winning comedy God of Carnage, will be performed as scheduled from April 14 to May 5.

But, the Playhouse being broke, the co-producer, the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, is going ahead with God of Carnage, backed by Vancouver Civic Theatres – essentially the Playhouse’s landlord. Good news for the actors and creative team.

Also good news for season subscribers, reportedly about 4,500 of them: Their tickets will be honoured.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

COLUMNISTS live in terror that their opus, or opi, will be overtaken by events.

Suppose you write a truculent rant about Senator Wyndbagg. Deadline, Monday. On Friday your golden words are committed to imperishable print. Phone rings Friday morning. “Hey, whaddya know? Senator Wyndbagg died last night. Oh, and great timing. Your knife job has broken the widow Wyndbagg’s heart.”

But enough frivolity. I’d be seriously delighted if my obituary for the Playhouse Theatre Company is obsolete when you read it – that this week some Good Samaritan (a Pharisee would be okay too) will have stepped forward and resurrected the Playhouse like Lazarus.

Biblical references aside, I’m in denial that the almost 50-year-old company is gone. And for a relatively paltry debt of about $900,000. This is a disaster for Vancouver theatre – all of it.

Just last April, thanks to West Vancouver businessman Peter Kains, I had lunch at the Sandman with managing artistic director Max Reimer, who had come back to Vancouver from Ontario in 2008 – ominous year of the market meltdown – with solid artistic and financial credentials, a rare combination. Reimer was volcanically euphoric: The Playhouse business plan was working. It had struck a deal for its off-theatre operations. Etc.

By last September, word leaked that city council had quietly bailed out the company with $900,000 in loans. This was self-fulfilling-prophecy territory: The investors, in this case season subscribers, already pinched by recession, backed off, numbers reportedly dropping from 8,000 to 4,500, and the money-spinning wine festival also floundered.

Theatre hangs by a thread – worse, by a silver hair of an aging audience badly needing an injection of youth.

Last week the Playhouse died, one play short of a season. I consider this its best for years. My personal favourite, the moving Tosca Café, deserved sold-out stickers. La Cage aux Folles was comparable to the 1984 Broadway production. Red was an unexpected treat.

Eccentrically, I frequently depart at intermission if a play doesn’t especially engage me, and did so at what turned out to be the Playhouse’s last Wednesday matinee, Hunchback. This paper’s Martin Millerchip expansively and admirably reviewed it, but my inmost secret is: I can’t stand cruelty, real or staged. I once left Les Miserables because I’d seen an earlier production and choked at another depiction of idealistic youth slain on the barricades.

Playhouse memories. Opening night of George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, 1967, with Frances Hyland, Chief Dan George, Robert Clothier, Ann Mortifee, my friend the late Walter Marsh – what a cast. Eric Nicol’s Like Father, Like Fun, which went on to Montreal and Toronto and bombed on Broadway – inspiring Nicol’s witty memoir of it, A Scar is Born. Norm Foster’s inventively spirited The Love List two years ago.

Save this company, someone. Ruin this column.

—

Closer to home, another sad closing: Dundarave Stationery.

Until a few years ago it was run by a couple of dear older ladies. West Vancouver has lost its last second-hand bookstore too, the oddly caparisoned successor to David Moon’s durable Bookstall having been replaced by a Persian art establishment.

—

Ah, but new and flashy monuments to upmarket consumers lie ahead. It says here that, the Grosvenor camel nose now having insinuated itself into the tent, I’ll bet anyone in the house that within 15 years the small north-side shops of the 1300-block will vanish. What Mayor Michael Smith dismissively called a “shantytown.” Oh, that’ll be good for those many small businesses already beset by an obstinately unrecovering recovery and high municipal taxes.

Human-scale citizens showed up at town hall by the hundreds – when was the last time rows of seats had to be placed in the foyer for the overflow? – mostly favouring a human-scale Ambleside.

Not the inevitable banks, chic shops, high-end (American?) chain stores and gleaming condos reaping much higher property taxes to pay our out-of-control senior managers at the hall.

Councillors assure critics that this is only an option to purchase, that they’ll still have the whip hand of zoning when the final sale goes through and Grosvenor’s feel-good-and-fuzzy plans materialize in detail. This is the classic equivalent of putting the frog in a pan of cold water and turning up the heat so slowly that it doesn’t know it’s dead.

The hype at Grosvenor’s storefront includes depiction of two solid blobs, no higher than three fingers of whiskey, joined by a little bent line, which represent eight-storey (currently forbidden) buildings and an atrium.

They’re so uninformatively innocuous you could miss them.

Letter-writer Christine Ballantine makes the persuasive point that the covered atrium, providing public access between Marine Drive and Bellevue, would attract vagrants.

If Grosvenor gets its eight storeys, what legal or moral leg will council have to stand on to turn down other developers on the block, demanding the same? Goodbye, shantyown, hello, Rodeo Drive Jr.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

AWRIGHT, youse cub reporters, line up, shut up, listen up, and learn good from an old bastard. Er, old master.

The lesson today is: At times in your trade – don’t let me hear you call it a “profession” – you will ask questions to persons in authority that you can take to the bank they won’t answer.

Which is why you ask the questions. You are putting on record silence. Which speaks.

OK, there’s a faint hope clause even in journalism. You could be wrong. They could fool you and reply. If they do (and if you don’t need a translation into English), there’s your story. If they don’t, there’s your story too. Can’t lose.

I clearly recall such a personal occasion. In fact it was last week. And, belatedly, I did get a response Monday, which blew my theory that is accurate 99 per cent of the time.

I emailed West Vancouver’s mayor and councillors three questions: “Are you satisfied with the WV bus shelters? Are you satisfied with the (in-camera) process that debated and approved them? If you are uneasy about that process – three of you were not party to it, and two have already expressed some misgivings – would you consider trying to renegotiate the contract with Pattison Outdoors?”

I’d heard a rumble that council might reply. Time passed. My theory looked 100 per cent accurate. Then Mayor Mike Smith emailed me:

“Council has asked that we respond to your request as a group. I have looked into this issue and offer the following:

“Council had previously challenged staff to find revenue opportunities to help offset the need for tax increases. In early 2011, staff were authorized to negotiate with Pattison Outdoor Advertising in regard to a possible opportunity.

“An agreement between the district and Pattison was reached and announced at a June 6, 2011 open council meeting.”

This I had been tipped to: “A manufacturing defect in the shelters which caused leaking was identified and has now been fixed. Adjustments to some shelters are being made to better accommodate the pedestrian environment.

“The overall revenue to West Van over the 20-year term will be between $1.1 and $2.3 million depending on ad revenue.”

(Interjection: Let’s say West Van’s share of Pattison Outdoors’ revenue is $2 million. That’s $100,000 a year for a town whose 2011 operating and capital budget totalled $93,820,375. Wow. If council was swayed by that . . . well, another lesson for you rookie reporters: If you’re gonna sell yourself – at least go big.)

Mayor Smith continues: “The district would have had capital expenditures of approximately $700,000 if we had paid for the shelters.

“I do not think there is any appetite on council to attempt to buy our way out of this contract. I have observed in driving through West Van that they are being well used by our citizens, especially when it is raining.”

Some valuable facts, from a mayor who has already set the standard for blunt openness. But it says here that the process – the in-camera meetings, the announcement of a done deal to citizens who didn’t know any deal was contemplated – fatally wounded the deal.

What’s to be done? If councillors had the moxie to publicly acknowledge that the Pam Goldsmith-Jones council made an honest mistake, mesmerized by pretty pictures, and urge Pattison Outdoors to consider the citizens’ widely held dislike of the bus “shelters”- they’d be making a statement, putting it out there, and the onus would be on the company to respond: Back up. Or ignore. Which (see above) speaks.

My sense is that Jimmy Pattison is a popular, even beloved citizen. What’s the price tag on that, Jimmy?

I’ve received one response applauding the shelters. Of the many opposed, I treasure this: “The one that bugs me once a week is at Marine and 15th outside the Esso station, where I fill up. That was always a nasty right-hand turn onto Marine Drive, but the hoarding has now made it difficult to see oncoming traffic until half the car is out in the curb-side lane.

“I hope that if someone demolishes one of these eyesores they are taken to court and successfully plead that far from committing vandalism, they have committed beautification.”

. . .

The AmblesideNow redevelopment awaits West Van council’s initial green light Monday – as ceremonial as the Queen’s signature on legislation.

Grosvenor’s current vision: Two eight-storey commercial/residential edifices on the police station site, joined by a public access atrium connecting Marine Drive and Bellevue.

Can’t improve on Scenery Slater’s Feb. 24 letter to the News editor, in part: Council seems “bound and determined to take the ‘village’ and turn it into yet another Metrotown or Coal Harbour.”

. . .

Is this the only country in the world where, watching women’s curling and specifically Manitoba vs.

Quebec, a husband turns to his wife and says: “What’s the best outcome for national unity?”

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

Appeared in Business in Vancouver – Issue 1158, January 3-9, 2012

Ken and Charlie would have been gratified.

Or would they?

This month, 70 years after the fall of Hong Kong and the beginning of the cruel ordeal of its defenders including Canadian soldiers like Ken Cambon and Charlie Considine, the Japanese government apologized.

Or did it?

Cambon, a 17-year-old rifleman, became a Vancouver doctor and UBC surgery professor, author of a-prisoner-of-war memoir ironically titled Guest of Hirohito. Charlie Considine was a Vancouver Sun and Province proofreader – insensitively called by at least one colleague “the monkey-eater.” The brutally treated  POWs caught and ate monkeys to augment their rotten food, literally rotten: Some gladly ate maggoty rice for its added protein. In the unequal battle 290 Canadians were killed; almost as many, 267, died in the camps.

When we met in 1963 Charlie, hunched and older than his years, unashamedly said he (still) feared the Japanese. When Japan apologized Dec. 8 for that regime’s viciousness – one of the cruellest white-hating Japanese actually came from Kamloops – Ken and Charlie were long dead.

Ah, the apology.  Canada hailed it. John Weston, a West Vancouver MP (his father captured at Singapore, his uncle legendary Victoria Cross winner “Smokey” Smith), and Eve Adams, up-and-coming Ontario MP and parliamentary secretary to Minister of Veterans Affairs Steven Blaney, spread the good word in Vancouver. At the West Van Legion they were met with a certain Saturday-night cheeriness and a light-hearted skeptical question by veteran Judy Young:  “Will they offer any compensation?” No, Adams replied. Young smiled, unsurprised. (A footnote: University student Andrew McManus, grandson of branch vice-president and veteran Donald Sinclair, wrote a paper arguing that the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, a link built by POWs, is historical rubbish. What’s the world coming to when you can’t trust Hollywood-hatched history?)

But, somewhat mysteriously, details of the apology were thin on the ground.  In fact it wasn’t issued from the top. It was made by the Japanese parliament’s vice-president for foreign affairs, Toshiyuki Kato, to a room of 14 people, including three frail POWs, among them Horace Gerrard, of Esquimalt. Kato didn’t speak from a written text and the ministry’s official record for that day makes no reference to any apology.

Politics-follows-the-money theorists might harbour the hard-eyed suspicion that the apology is linked to trade, notably in a year when Japan’s economy was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami, followed by GM toppling Toyota as the world’s No. 1 carmaker. (Declaration of interest: This writer’s wife’s 2000 Toyota Echo, 320,000 clicks on the clock, is far tougher – better – than any car in my 60 years of automotive acquaintance.)

In 1995 Japan was Canada’s second-biggest trade partner.  No more. Still, in 2010 Canada exported $9.06 billion of goods to Japan – B.C.’s $4.19 billion by far the largest of any province – and imported $13.44 billion, of which $2.51 billion went to B.C., giving the province a favourable balance of trade.

A Grinch take in a merry season? In contrast, Derrill Henderson is euphoric. As national secretary of the Hong Kong Veterans Association and founder of the Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association (for POW families), he patiently sought an apology for 13 years, engaging with a receptive Japanese embassy.  And, he stressed, Kato’s title disguises his importance: He’s foreign ministry point man for North America. Kato spoke without text. Henderson didn’t seek a high-level political apology: “We wanted and would not accept anything but a face-to-face apology.” He copied a few of Kato’s words: “Deep remorse … a heartfelt apology.”

Present were just four Japanese and 10 Canadians, including three POWs and their caretakers. “I guess I’m a romantic,” Henderson says, “but I honestly felt there was a bunch of soldiers in that room.”

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

Appeared in Business in Vancouver – Issue 1154, December 6-12, 2011

Paul Martin looked at a clock in Vancouver and saw that it was late.

The clock was the debt clock in the window of a downtown bank, Martin was on a year’s tour of Canada to sell his deficit-reduction plan,  and as finance minister he was determined to do it. And did.

“I’ve got to tell you, Vancouver’s debt clock didn’t hurt,” Martin chuckled, speaking between engagements. He’d just flown in from Tunisia where he was one of a nine-member African Union and UN think tank, one of the only two non-African members. In Washington he was just about to grab a nap before advising Americans about their present, infinitely larger debt.

Martin, finance minister from 1993 to 2002, is credited with doing, 10 years before the current global crisis, what the rest of the world should now be doing, and thus positioning Canada – in the early 1990s the worst G7 basket case except Italy – to be the poster boy for taking proper and timely action.

Martin, who 20-odd years ago gave the undersigned one of the best interviews of his career, at the time of the Liberal leadership race with Jean Chretien – “what if we’re having a beauty contest, and he’s winning?” among his bon mots – is modest about his accomplishment. He eliminated a $42 billion budget deficit in four years. And he credited the Canadian people for bearing the sacrifice equally.

He’s telling the Americans that the Republicans and Democrats are trying to dump the sacrifice on each other. The U.S. government has to unite the people behind them.

How did Martin – who was in Vancouver on the weekend as part of a panel discussing what to do about voter apathy – pull it off, especially in his own party?

First, ordinary Canadians didn’t doubt the severity of the problem. They were just sceptical that anything could be done about it.

Martin gave his pitch touring the country for a year. Then in Ottawa he took caucus members aside in groups of just five and explained his plan to them. Cabinet was a tougher sell.

“Cabinet would be not unlike you and me,” Martin said. “Cabinet said ‘You’ve got to deal with the deficit, but my department is so important you can’t touch me’ – which is a perfectly natural thing.”

Stroke of luck: “The Mexican peso crisis occurred two months before I brought down the big budget in 1994 and interest rates were going through the roof. When cabinet saw that, they said “Yeah, we know you’ve got to do it.’ “

The clincher was that Martin set yearly targets. He understands why Greeks are disbelievers today when targets are set and then missed. Martin hit his targets.

Does he get enough credit for his feat? “Look, I get people stopping me on the street from time to time. But this is the truth: This was a great Canadian victory.”

He had helpers, and he praises them unstintingly. His deputy ministers were David Dodge and Don Drummond, who went on to become governor of the Bank of Canada and chief economist of the TD Bank respectively. “They were very strong, and beneath them they were very strong. I had the strongest people in the government, thank God.”

And what should Canada be doing right now? “I think we should be investing in infrastructure and education because other countries can’t do it. This is a chance for us when labour costs are low and interest rates are low to really steal a march on the rest of the world so we’ll be much more competitive when they get their act together.”  Got that, Mr. Harper?

© Trevor Lautens, 2011

Appeared in Business in Vancouver – Issue 1149, November 1-7, 2011

About 45 minutes into the opening Occupy Vancouver rally I had, unbidden, a racial moment. Where were the visible immigrants?

The rally’s dominant theme was variations on the now well-known “1/99” – the one per cent of the fabulously rich and the rest of us. In truth scholarly research indicates that one per cent of Americans own about 40 per cent of the nation’s wealth. (And, glossed over, shell out something like that per cent in taxes.)  Not to be smug. The Conference Board of Canada acknowledges that the wealth gap is smaller here but growing faster than in the U.S., and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty himself is advising retailers to cool down their prices.

But racial diversity at the rally was conspicuous by its absence. One leader whose photo ran in the public prints was Asian. The odd young ethnic Chinese, who looked like curious non-participating students. Few aboriginals. Here and there people whose origins could have been the Middle East, perhaps Iranians, and India. Not one black face did I see.

In this, allegedly the most ethnically diverse city on the continent, where a newspaper coincidentally reported that 60 per cent of Richmond residents are immigrants and 40 per cent are ethnically Chinese, the persons gathered in hostility toward capitalism were – almost to a man and woman – as white as a Mississippi town council around 1950.

Tentative conclusion: It is entirely possible that Third World immigrants had more pressing previous engagements – practising  capitalism, shamelessly.

They had flown to capitalism. It’s always been a one-way street from regimes where medievalism, ties of religion, party, class, or family predetermine winners and losers, and to a better land, warts and all, than they had known, where they could prosper freely using their wits and sweat. Any deserved guilt there? As Dr. Johnson drily said, “A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is getting money.”

But – if tempted, hold the applause. As a member of the upper working class (which I define as having a father who had a steady job in the 1930s, when I was born), I feel deeply for the confused, innocent victims of time and place, especially the children, the badly educated, the loyal, laid-off 50-year-old, the unemployable chronically ill. It is handy but ultimately witless to think in categories, either of the unfeeling rich, or of the deserved broke. Each of is a statistic of one.

You cannot preach Adam Smith to a desperate mother. You cannot lecture – and there’s some nearly obscene lecturing going on in some media – to a bewildered man that 99 per cent of the world’s people would consider Canadians among the one per cent that the protesters vilify, so be grateful.

Memories swim back half a century to a wallet-light honeymooning couple, assuring so many Mexicans who insisted on washing their Morris Minor car with a rag and a pail of water, “We are poor people!” – quietly scorned, like their bad Spanish, because self-evidently they were rich, they had a car, they were not scratching for a bare living but travelling, staying in hotels, lunching on sunny patios. A wise young man crystallized this for me with offhand brilliance: “You measure yourself against what you can see, not against what you can’t see.”

That is why the wider resentment exists, is legitimate, and why, assuming this isn’t a year like 1848 or 1968, and unless it gets much nastier in an age when violence can spread with the speed of so-called social media, it would be more than a pity if it sputtered out without action in this country of a coat of many colours.

© Trevor Lautens, 2011

I’M reluctant to speak ill of the politically departed, but the gatekeeper who waved in Jimmy Pattison’s widely disliked “bus shelters” in West Vancouver was Pamela Goldsmith-Jones.

The buck stops there – on the mayor’s desk. She was mayor. She was CEO. She set the agenda. It’s a myth that a mayor is just another councillor.

The ersatz “shelters” in fact are mini-billboards – and then mayor Mark Sager lowered the boom on billboards of any size in West Vancouver in the 1990s. Mayors Pat Boname and Ron Wood evidently saw no reason to scrap the prohibition.

It would have been fascinating to be the gadfly on the wall if and when Goldsmith-Jones and Sager – who ironically now takes a make-the-best-of-it stance, proposing displays of West Vancouver art on some shelters – discussed the issue after the latter’s closed-door council session unanimously approved the Pattison pitch last May.

From the start the decision was tainted – disgracefully tainted, in my view, because Goldsmith-Jones chose not to let the mere unsuspecting public in on the issue, supposedly because it involved a private company’s confidential finances and thus merited incamera consideration.

Council-watcher and former councillor Carolanne Reynolds of West Vancouver Matters denounced council’s secrecy. She’s too courteous to call town hall’s rationale for the in-camera decision pure BS. But I will.

Some of the “shelters” impede pedestrians and wheelchairs, obscure small business signs and entrances, block vision of oncoming buses, and finally do a lousy job of sheltering more than a few people in anything but a light, windless rain. Pattison Outdoors offered town hall the sweetener of an estimated $2 million share of its West Vancouver billboard advertising revenues over the 20-year contract. None of citizens’ business? The hell it isn’t.

I phoned Jimmy offering an interview for his side of the matter, asking that the request be put directly to him. His legendary secretary, who turns aside unwelcome calls like Roberto Luongo stops pucks on his best nights, instead referred me to Rob Hunt of Pattison Outdoors. Hunt left a message saying there was nothing “more” to say. Hadn’t said anything to me.

When the Downtown Eastside gets angry, militant rent-a-crowds are marshalled. Vancouver media pour in, cameras snapping. Vandalism possible. Top of the Six O’clock News. That’s not West Vancouver’s style. We’re too “respectable.” The political and development elites know this well.

If you’ve just dropped in to West Van for a cup of tea, you may not know that The Pattison Group is second – only to giant Telus – among B.C.-based top national and global companies: Revenue $7.2 billion in latest available year, 34,000 employees. Jimmy, as everyone calls him, merits highest praise for fighting unemployment – by providing real jobs, unlike the government’s “programs” and “stimulus” – and for his community work. He casts a blind eye on ideology, hiring on merit former socialist premier Glen Clark. I think highly of Jimmy. No vendetta here.

But, in his own town, he’s erected those unpopular “shelters.” Any chance he’d reconsider? Nope, one businessman believes, then he’d have to do the same if Brantfordians or Calgarians or whoever didn’t like theirs.

That old treacly saying that “money can’t buy everything” happens to be true. Some things really can’t be bought. Like lost affection. For top businessmen or still-ambitious ex-mayors.

. . .

As Jeremy Shepherd dutifully reported in this paper Feb. 3, West Van Mayor Mike Smith hasn’t changed either his words or tune since his acclamation in November.

Diplomacy isn’t Smith’s long suit. He blistered Metro Vancouver’s board for the triviality of its meetings – no business discussed, kindergarten patty-cake emails sent to the 37 members asking such profound questions as “What three guests would you invite for dinner? (Living, dead or fictional.)” (My own list: The Three Stooges.) Metro board chairman Greg Moore denied everything. He would, wouldn’t he?

But words aren’t actions. A major test of Smith’s grit: How he stickhandles the spongy, PR-goosed AmblesideNOW project, unkindly called AmblesideNO! by the undersigned.

. . .

Personal note. Robert Plommer was the most intimidating father I ever faced in decades of dating. His lawyer’s forehead bulged with a huge, restless brain, which surely sensed that I wasn’t good enough for his meltingly attractive daughter Leslie. But was any male?

Plommer, long a West Van resident, led prosecutions in big, complex cases involving Commonwealth Trust and Dr. William Jory (which Jory won, to Plommer’s anger). But his raging passion was golf. At his memorial service two weeks ago at Capilano Golf and Country Club – superbly MCed by Leslie, retiring after a career at the Globe and Mail, and the U.K.’s Times and Guardian newspapers – lawyers, friends and of course golfers joined his wife Sybil and family recounting stories about Bob. For more than three hours! Passed like a minute.

And ending with son Evan leading the bereft in the only song Bob enjoyed: Spanish Eyes. He’d have loved it all. Splendid day for golf too.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012

FAMOUS saying: You can’t beat city hall. But occasionally you can persuade the folks there to see the error of their ways.

So Neil Thompson convinced West Vancouver town hall to consider expanding public skating hours at the local rink. Took him only eight years. And no final decision yet.

Thompson’s proposals aren’t all that revolutionary. They seem to be the essence of good sense. He suggests skating for adults and high school students Fridays and Saturdays from 8 to 10 p.m. Currently there is an adults only skate Tuesday nights at 6: 15 and Friday nights at 6: 45 (“couldn’t be at a more inconvenient time,” he notes) and no public skating Saturdays and Sundays.

Thompson is a fine, old style West Van character, preyuppification, pre-monster houses, pre-insane real estate prices. Visibly successful, in earlier life he was an investment dealer.

His age won’t be divulged here because he looks young enough to be a magnet for women half his calendar years. And he is. He and Kia, his tiny schipperke dog, are fixtures at Ambleside Beach. With friend and retired geologist Stan Fleischman – who has his own canine companion, gentle retriever Tessie – they can be seen on a beachside bench greeting passersby and solving the world’s problems any sunny day.

But there is steel under that charming exterior. Thompson has opinions. Strong ones. He disseminates them freely and frequently in letters to the editor of this and lesser papers – and to West Van council and staff. Some approach the rotundity and style of the Magna Carta.

It was his campaign for public skating changes that finally wore down town hall. “I was advised to ‘forget about it,’ ‘you’ll never change city hall,’ and ‘get a life, relax, why be concerned,’” he reminded mayor and council in a December letter chronicling eight years of frustration.

“But, eureka! A ray of hope appeared. A call from city hall said my name was put forward to act as an advocate for the public and to attend the yearly meeting of rink users to discuss time allocations. A window of opportunity – thanks, city hall!”

Thompson attended the meeting, “loaded for bear” and prepared for a fight. “Wow, guess what? These other users said one by one, “sounds reasonable to me,” “why not?” . . . 100 per cent support, co-operation and good will.”

Battle-scarred, the war not yet over, Thompson is cautious: “The new schedules are made this month for the new year. We must hope oldstyle bureaucracy does not prevail to kill this initiative.”

. . .

May I praise a North Shore News advertiser? Thank you.

Last August, Sears’ furnace serviceman visited our house and left us $901 poorer. Fair enough. The furnace, approaching its 40th birthday, was due for serious work.

In November it began to growl. Then howl. Patience exhausted, I phoned Sears, prepared for heated, you might say, debate. A good offence being better than a good defence, I launched into a belligerent complaint.

I was nearing full flight before realizing the Sears furnace man was calmly agreeing with me. Fixed. Under warranty. No charge.

In contrast, I recently dealt with an urgent bathroom problem at my tenanted house. A plumber visiting on another matter offered to fix it on his own time for $2,600 – cash. Meaning no receipt, no guarantee, no tax, no thanks.

When I turned to a well-established Vancouver plumbing company claiming membership in the Better Business Bureau, and a tiler of more vague credentials, they piously denounced such illegal moonlighting. They got the job – and their bill totalled $5,000-plus.

Faced with five tenants and one shower, I admit barely glancing at estimates and rushing acceptance. An emergency, a west-side house, a West Vancouver landlord: Beware, that’s a recipe for creative arithmetic for slippery tradesmen.

Now hear this: I pay quickly. But time passed. No receipts followed. Nothing to prove they’d done the work at all. In short, no better than that under-the-table moonlighter. When, under pressure, they produced receipts, the plumber had stretched 4½ hours into seven – at $95 per.

The lesson is: The big company, Sears, stood behind its work – and big companies, so often popularly maligned because they’re big, generally do.

Reminder: The tradesman who comes in your door is not your friend. He’s there on business – his.

. . .

No music critic was in sight for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Jan. 26 matinee. Pity. They’d have seen a sensational seduction satire from Bizet’s Carmen between soprano Nadya Blanchette and beloved host Christopher Gaze. She lassoed him with her red scarf. She drew him unwillingly near. They rubbed backs, yes, on the dignified Orpheum stage! They ended with a torrid kiss that would have been banned in Boston, even today. The audience (our average age around 100) was convulsed with laughter, or envy.

© Trevor Lautens, 2012