What If Full of Itself Vancouver Seceded from Canada?

What has happened to Mick Singh Parson -- the once mild mannered history buff and restaurant critic who became a CityState national hero and then Public Enemy Number One? This authenticated letter from Mick to his daughter arrived in our offices last week. We share it with our readers:

My cinnamon sprinkle, my precious daughter, I read in the Sun you want me "dead." Sounds like you've been talking to your mother. But I'd rather think the papers are lying about you just as they lie about me.

I'd rather think that what you really wish for me is a quick and clean getaway to some place like heaven -- some new place not unlike our own Vancouver CityState with its high-tech salmon festivals, zero-tolerance diaper recycling, three dozen microbreweries and 31 types of year-round locally grown salad greens -- a heaven where newly re-sculpted thighs can hackeysack 24 hours a day on blissfully smoke-free beaches.

In heaven, though, I'd never have suffered the sickening misfortune of being made a hero and then recast as a murdering traitor.

I sigh.

Maybe what I read in today's Sun is an exaggeration. After all, the papers have managed to make my own past mistakes seem like calculated genius. Maybe all you really told them in your gum-scented 10-year-old way is that I've became a flabby humiliation best zapped from your life altogether. Which (I sigh again), is probably true.

And so, my little crème brûlée, I'll leave you in peace. But, before I leave, will you grant me one last wish? It's this: a history lesson from your father. Will you please read my account of this great big mess? My truths about the Granville Island Uprising... the Secession... those pesky Russians... the Quality of Experience Police... the (disputed) body counts -- and finally about certain somebodies who definitely do want me dead? Darling, I beg of you, please read on.

You're too young to have a feeling for Vancouver before it was CityState. In Aug. 1997, at 22, I got my first taste -- a mere brat with Day-Glo Frisbees dancing in his eyes, here to compete in the World Ultimate Championships. Well, it was fun, but our team made a quick exit, and my pals all headed back to Etobicoke. All except for me. I applied to UBC's Teacher-Ed program, got a job cleaning whale guano from the Aquarium's filters and rented a mildewed basement suite on Yew. Then I fluked into a job reviewing restaurants for Terminal City. The next few months were tranquil. Vancouver's big political worries were minor: how many flowering cherry trees to replant and whether or not to build a casino on the new island of muck and stones growing in Coal Harbour during construction of the Lions Gate Tunnel.

Oh sure, news came from Quebec that another referendum was scheduled for April 3, 1999. But it was like hearing about yet one more of Liz Taylor's hospital emergencies -- the prima donna always pulled through, so why waste energy worrying? Way off in Quebec, 54 per cent may have approved a murkily worded pseudo-sovereignty statement, but here in town, April 3 was a warm day, a beautiful day, a wait-and-see kind of day.

Then, overnight, France, Slovenia, and Iran were recognizing the Free State of Quebec. Chrétien shuttled home from Washington with nothing more than this wimp-ism from Clinton: "I feel their pain 'cuz I'm from a divorced family myself. In Arkansas when there's a domestic spat next door, you'd best stay out of it 'til they cool off." Clinton of course had read his own polls. A mere nine percent supported troop involvement in Canada -- a non-issue for Yanks.

By summer Quebec's Sûreté secret police-slash-goon squad and the Parizeau Brigades -- those infamous PBs -- had quelled Montreal's Rue-St.-Denis riots and secured all key Quebec border points. They dared the massing Canadian forces to cross over and risk a blood bath. By mid-August the Loonie was worth 49 cents U.S., and Canadian bonds were nose-diving. When the feds went looking for something to shore up the leaking economy, their eyes naturally fell on British Columbia.

Imagine the effect in Vancouver when Chrétien announced: 1) Even more groaningly large new taxes on corporate and individual offshore assets. 2) A $5,000 head tax on immigrants retroactive to 1996. 3) Big new taxes on real-estate transactions. 4) The end of tax breaks for foreign-based film productions. And 5) A slew of new SELs (Surcharges on Entertainment and Leisure -- the "frivolity" taxes?).

The answer came, big, black and loud, on the front page of the Dec. 19, 1999, Province: "Pacific Grim! Investors Shun B.C."

Live it up and let live

The millennium didn't start out any better. First Nations reserves resembled Beirut, and Mordecai Richler urged Westmounters on as they lobbed "Molson cocktails" at body armoured PBs from behind their stone fences. In the north, Cree grand chief Matthew Coon-Come and Inuit leaders were demanding that federal troops enforce their vision of a partitioned Quebec.

Chaos blossomed, exactly as Pierre Trudeau and his crew had long before predicted in a secret think-tank scenario. In 1976, Trudeau's Privy Council Office told him to get ready for "a long process of propaganda, manoeuvring and 'guerrilla warfare' with no early or decisive confrontation." In 1999 Chrétien was doing just that. First off, he needed bodies at the borders, and so began the conscription of 18- to 25-year-olds. As we all know, Chrétien's gambit backfired west of Ontario, and here in Vancouver, Commercial Drive became the draft-resistance hotbed of Canada, with grizzled old 'Nam dodgers leading round-the-clock teach-ins at the WaaZuBee.

Vancouver was alive with dissent! But our economy was choking to death on those foreign-bashing, "nation-saving" taxes. The city was hemorrhaging investment; the few real-estate deals that still went through were conducted in U.S. or offshore currency. Stilled, rusting cranes dotted the skyline. Fired construction workers slept rough in Stanley Park, panhandled for beer and a few pieces of SushiRobo. Their restless disillusionment found a friend in the draft-resistance movement, an alliance that seemed to coalesce on June 26, 2000, the day the Lions Gate Tunnel finally opened. On that wet morning, the old bridge was turned over to a milling crowd of pedestrians, bikers and in-line skaters, and what began as the "Festival of Feet" ended up a thousands-strong protest of clenched fists. The slogans of that day sill ring in my ears: "Jobs, Yes -- Poutine, No!" And: "Condos, Not Conscripts!"

How important a role Vancouver played in the collapse of the Chrétien government is debatable. Folks on the Drive were joyously quick to claim credit, but when Preston Manning's Reform Party won enough seats in the Sept. 8 election to form a ruling coalition with the Tories, the celebration moved down the Fraser, up the Okanagan, anywhere Manning's dour populism struck a chord -- anywhere but here. Pretty soon the city felt like a single island of "live it up and let live" within a Canada (what was left of it, anyway) that was lurching hard to the right.

Worse, Manning was welching on the tax breaks he'd promised. The new PM saw nothing to be gained in eliminating Chrétien's perversely anti-Vancouver tax package. Why seem to coddle a city with too much good weather and too many foreigners, a haven for hedonists and amoral flippers of heritage homes?

As for the draft, Manning had grown a soul patch and was photographed drinking de-alcoholized beer atop a Hummer, signalling to all the world that Canada's ever more youthful prime minister was not one bit afraid of a little civil war. Was Manning's body-modifying time-reversal a bluff to scare Quebec into negotiating some shrunken version of sovereignty? Or was the preacher's son truly girding himself for a holy crusade to re-establish One Nation Under God? Whatever the intent, the result was a total breakdown in the Detroit peace talks. All along the disputed Quebec borders, sometimes bloody skirmishes flared as each camp awaited the next diplomatic move.

In the tank

What moved next instead, as everyone knows, was the hand of God, who saw fit to calamitously rearrange the crust of the earth beneath Vancouver.

You, my little crabcake, can't imagine the madness of that early morning, Dec. 26, 2000 -- the Boxing Day Quake. Me, I was where you'd find me most mornings at 8:32 a.m.: bent over one of the Aquarium's filters, working to dislodge bits of partially digested squid from its stainless-steel mesh.

The first thing I heard wasn't the quake itself. Rather, it was the terrible symphony of whale moans -- the click-whistle-groans from deep within the agitated orcas before I felt the first tremor. And then came the crash, like all the world's fireworks exploding at once -- the filter shed keeling from its foundation, then crashing down around me; the far-off renting and twisting of the collapsing Lions Gate Bridge -- 127 bargain-shopping souls sent onward to their next lives; the crashing of glass tanks and the flapping gasping fish; the chorus of shouts from my fellow Aquarium personnel as they strained to make rescues amid the rubble, or strained, simply, to survive. Then, cacophony: shrieking herons wheeling above; barking sea lions on the loose; a young gift-shop employee's screams from beneath a mound of frightened octopi.

The noise ended. I pulled the young woman free. We wiped the slime from her outfit and stepped over black-finned reef sharks flopping on the wet, shattered glass. I remember, from the corner of my eye, a beluga's Zen smile, tragic and knowing. The young woman vanished, and I was determined to find her someday.

By the time I reached the orca pool, it was already two-thirds drained. Water poured from a yawning crack in the side, the leak partially stoppered by the drowned body of the dolphin Whitewings. Had she sacrificed herself in an attempt to save her orca playmates Finna and Bjossa? I believe so. I like to think that Whitewings looked on as I stood in the drained tank hosing down the orcas, as I helped slip the harnesses beneath their ice-cream-sundae bellies, as a helicopter, hired in a moment of inspired PR brilliance by MacMillan Bloedel, gently lifted the whales into the air and deposited them in English Bay. Years later I think about how that one small effort was so generously rewarded, as Finna and Bjossa stayed to make English Bay their home -- all these years happily feeding on seafood donated by chic restaurants. Those whales who after the Quake offered us a symbol of frolicking resilience we so badly needed. Today, of course, loyal Finna and Bjossa provide a guilt-free, no-fuss whale-watching attraction worth millions annually to CityState.

The quake was 7.9 -- but I don't know how you assign a mere number to the fury that punched down the Second Narrows, Granville, Burrard and Patullo bridges, that laid indiscriminate waste to both Vancouver Specials and lovely old Craftsmans -- a quake that capriciously saved the Warsaw skyline of the West End while liquefying Richmond into chocolate pudding and swallowing Granville Island whole. Why did the Lions Gate Tunnel hold while Library Square pancaked? Why was Gastown spared, Yaletown not? We don't have answers. We have "7.9" and other numbers: $12 billion in property losses, 30,000 injured, 1,600 dead.

"Tribulation, my friend, is curriculum," my old UBC teacher-ed prof had once mumbled to me as he handed me yet another failing grade. Well, the Boxing Day Quake taught Vancouver a few truths about itself and its relation to the rest of Canada, didn't it? There was the fact that Manning spared us a pathetic few hundred troops he dared divert from the siege of Quebec, while the Americans, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese and Australians were our true saviours, lending us the thousands of strong bodies we needed to dig out.

Lesson two might be termed Life beyond Hope. When the quake-triggered landslide wiped out the highways, railways, power grid and natural gas lines passing through the narrow Hope corridor, it seems our very lifeline had been cut. But what we learned, weeks and months later, is that Vancouver, with a little help from friends around the Rim, could and should start imagining for itself a self-sufficient destiny.

Dear Mother

Am I saying that most or even many Vancouverites could see, in the devastation all around them, grand opportunity? No, but it was enough that one woman possessed that vision, a woman whose name back then was shrouded in obscurity. I am speaking of course, of Francine McDermott Lee, the Mother of our CityState.

Like most, I first took notice of her name in the Sun, on Jan. 11, 2001. David Baines, investigating the near-autonomous status of the Vancouver International Airport Authority, had unearthed expense-account evidence that Lee had held numerous meetings in Singapore with, among others, the chiefs of 10 Asia banks, the First Bank of Australia and various B.C. moguls. Asked by Baines to explain, Lee's quote was terse: "You'll know soon enough."

A month later she was back in the papers, this time striking a triumphant pose on YVR's tarmac. She'd managed to repair the quake-damaged runways in record time, clearing the way for the first of uncounted planeloads of "temblor tourists" so integral to our economic recovery at the time. Here, in the middle of all the mess, was a woman who fixed things fast. This while federal funds (and attention) were being diverted to the endless Quebec situation, and daily protests in the ruins of the since-restored Law Courts went unheeded in Ottawa.

Francine Lee delivered on her promise -- big time. On April 2, 2001, in the open-air studios of VTV, she unveiled her proposal, worked out in secret with those mysterious Asian bankers and various global billionaires, to make Vancouver "a sovereign city-state." Her pitch was a hybrid Switzerland/Cayman Island model: an independent Vancouver would repudiate those onerous federal taxes on foreign assets, immigration, leisure and entertainment, and declare itself a "free-trade zone" for global banking, finance and "knowledge" industries. Long-term residents would receive "pioneer-status" tax rebates based on their number of years here. A priority would be to restore real-estate values -- so integral to the Vancouver identity -- to pre-Quake levels. Enshrined in the CityState would be a human-rights charter to safeguard "absolute tolerance of every race, creed, sexuality and lifestyle not harmful to fellow citizens." The resulting Vancouver, in the immortal words of Lee, would be "a kick-back Hong Kong or maybe a kick-ass Honolulu, take your pick. Anything but the ignored child -- the good but taken-for-granted daughter of Ottawa that we are today."

Reporters rushed forward, asking: Is this city really angry enough, brave enough to go it alone? Lee's winking response: "Give me one year." Then, somehow she pulled enough levers or called in enough favours to get every municipality in the GVRD to participate in the Great CityState Referendum (privately financed and run), set for Feb. 1, 2002.

At first few took the woman and her idea seriously -- even after Lee brokered the deal that would rebuild Richmond. (Hong Kong tycoons pledged financing for today's earthquake-proof city of "Popsicle architecture," dozens of towers on thin shafts that sway in the muck.) Then, on September 9, Prime Minister Manning, after months of "no comment," declared the notion of Vancouver as CityState "a typical Lotus Land hallucination. Who is Francine Lee and what is she smoking?" Two days later, polls showed an 11-point gain for the yes side, bumping it to 39 per cent.

In November, Prime Minister Preston Manning added fuel to the fire by revealing that the federal government, which owned Granville Island, had "no immediate plans" to rebuild the former tourist magnet. "Maybe after we've resolved Quebec there will be money and manpower for theme parks again." The next day, effigies of Manning burned on the Granville mud flats, where, in the months to follow, a growing, motley band of protesters (among them earthquake homeless, gaunt construction workers and out-of-work-movie-of-the-week crews) took up residence. A huge banner draped from the wreckage of the Granville Bridge shouted a message for Manning: We Want Our Island Back! Sarah McLachlan, k.d. lang, Raffi, Oh Susanna and a paunchy, hard–of-hearing Sting dropped by to sing their support at a giant benefit concert.

Tomorrow: Click here for the exciting, bullet-flying wrap-up to our saga. How Vancouver becomes a city state, and how our unlikely hero Mick Singh Parson, trying to capitalize on his new found fame, gets in way, way over his head.

By the way... what do you think? What did this slightly cracked crystal ball get right and wrong? Please add your comment to the thread below.