On The 2011 Vancouver Riot, and Rage in Canadian Politics
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Years ago on a stint as a construction worker in rural Alberta, I met a peculiar coworker. We’ll call him Travis. Travis, like most of the men on that work crew, was from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. Travis in particular was from the suburbs of Vancouver.
One day I found myself alone in a truck with Travis. This was in 2014, three years after the Stanley Cup riots that had struck Vancouver in 2011. Travis’s city, I said, had embarrassed our whole country that night.
“Not to mention,” I went on, “the people who did it tried covering their faces on their way home on the Skytrain to avoid being tagged by the cameras.”
I remember Travis giving me a peculiar look. Then he casually replied, as his eyes flicked back towards the road, that he had participated in the riots. “You have it wrong,” he said. “My friends and I covered our faces on the Skytrain on our way in to Vancouver that night, not just on the way out. We knew that riot was going to happen. It wasn’t about the game at all.”
I was shocked. Not by what he had said, but the fact that I had never heard it before. The 2011 Vancouver hockey riot was premeditated? In the minds of most people and the government, that night the city was enveloped in what was simply a sports “hooligan riot”. It had no deeper social causes beyond too much alcohol, poor police planning and wounded local pride.
I asked Travis why he and his friends did it. I’m paraphrasing. “Because we were angry at the city,” he had said. “Because we had been forced out of Vancouver by the rental prices. I grew up there and it pushed me out.”
That night was his opportunity for revenge. A outlet for a bottled up and unchanneled rage at a city that had let him down, and to which he no longer felt any love or loyalty towards.
It’s fine to take Travis’ admission with a grain of salt. Or consider the critical mass of rioters to still have simply been drunk hockey fans.
But the fact that at minimum a small number of those people premeditated the violence says something about how we understand that riot. We made a choice to understand it as a hockey riot, and nothing else.
I believe we make that choice far too often. Canadian political discourse, owing to its reflexive comparison with our tumultuous neighbours to the south, dislikes acknowledging the profound structural issues currently facing our country. It’s easier to cast aspersions on the Americans and their many problems than to acknowledge that on several major issues, the Americans are doing better than we are.
That brings me to housing. There still exists a wilful blindness in much of Canadian political discourse towards acknowledging just how serious the situation has become for renters, and how much anger it’s brewing. There is a rage and nihilism building our country that as yet have few outlets.
We’re all Vancouverites Now
Vancouver was the first major Canadian city to experience truly exuberant housing and rental price increases. The rental price of an apartment in the city more than doubled between 2000 and 2011, while the cost of an attached or semi detached home there rose even faster.
Vancouver-style rental increases have now, of course, spread to the rest of the country. Canada is now in a full blown social crisis with regard to housing and wider cost of living. Every major city in the country has seen rental prices explode since the COVID-19 pandemic, with real incomes lagging far behind. It has become significantly more expensive, in real terms, to live in Canada over the past decade.
In many major cities, rent has almost doubled in the last ten years. Canadians are facing a series of crises — housing, healthcare, and income inequality — that are unprecedented.
In other words, one of the most epic public policy failures in the history of North America is playing out in front of us.
I moved into my sunny one bedroom apartment in Ottawa in Aug. 2020. My stabilized monthly rent is currently $1350. The average for a one bedroom in the city is now $1950 per month.
Forget about owning a home. I can’t even move apartments. This is while making slightly more than the average median household income for the city.
People who aren’t renters can’t quite appreciate the psychology of this. The precariousness of it is terrifying. I can lose my apartment — my only sanctuary — whenever my landlord pleases, and will struggle find anywhere else to live. My familiar neighbourhood, my access to my work, my proximity to my friends, all of that would face annihilation.
This is why no other political topic is as central to peoples lives as affordable housing. It is the issue upon which all others are given the space to be debated.
Consider Toronto. I was born and raised there. I will likely never return. Barring a salary increase that would blast me into the top 10% of Canadian income earners (which average salaries in Toronto do not fall into), I technically wouldn’t be able to afford a one-bedroom unit anywhere in the city.
It was not like this 10 years ago. I have effectively been excluded from Toronto, the city of my birth, forever. And I’m not the only one. More people are leaving the GTA than at any time in its history because it’s become too expensive to live there.
The prospect of never seeing the opportunities for prosperity my parents received, never getting on the housing ladder and never experiencing living in my old neighbourhood doesn’t engender a sense of frustration and longing. It fills me with a kind of nihilistic rage. It engenders an open question within me of why I should even bother to work so hard, and do all the other things to fulfill my end of Canada’s unspoken social contract.
And rental prices, real wages, and wealth inequality are all projected to get worse from here. So what am I supposed to do? What are the effective, socially acceptable outlets?
We Don’t Know How to Act Up
Canadians like to think of ourselves as a polite and agreeable people. That, I believe, has become grave problem. The events of the last few years have convinced me that a more accurate description is that we’re a perilously passive aggressive and complacent people.
Our age old belief that we’re more refined and progressive than our boorish neighbours to the south has engrained a terminal unwillingness to truly misbehave.
Canadians lack the cultural and political psychology to tolerate and nurture mass protest movements. Like, real protest movements. Ones that are truly disruptive, truly unruly and truly threatening to the government. The protests that are completely unpalatable for most people, especially ones who live in downtown cores. The ones that break all the conventions of a polite society.
Decades of sleepy prosperity has erased this spirit. It still exists in European countries and even the U.S., but not here. In spite of our professed progressive ideals, in many ways Canadian political culture is actually quite conservative. Pearls are clutched when real mass resistance rears its head.
One of the most impactful protests in Canadian history took place in downtown Ottawa less than two years ago. I did not join it or support its goals, and it was not free of alarming extremist elements. But the mixture of terror and condescension that the Canadian political class responded to it with was unmissable. All for a protest where hardly anyone was injured, and no businesses were seriously damaged. It bears no comparison to the pandemonium that has routinely taken place in France and the U.S. these last few years.
Some Days I Feel a Lot Like Travis
I know better than to profess a desire to break laws, or encourage others to do so. I don’t condone it.
But I do believe that the social contract we were given as young Canadians has been truly broken, and the rage and nihilism that that is brewing needs to be acknowledged and channeled. Older generations lack the lived experience and livings situations to grasp this. It is the underlying reason why younger generations across the Western world are beginning to turn towards more extreme political parties.
The pull of extremism will only grow stronger among Canadians who feel that they have less and less to lose.
