(Earnest crow-eating as an introduction:)

Look. You need to know what is happening in Vancouver, and pretty much every city, town, village, and community in Canada. This country has cratered and collapsed all the way to the molten core of the globe we call Earth; Canadian citizens are howlingly conflict-averse and unflinchingly passive; and there is no getting through to anyone here. Not a chance. We have no cultural history of citzens rising up, taking control, and enacting a serious overhaul and revolution. Canada has become a terrified, confused, collapsing and failed social experiment. There is no future here None. I apologize outright to every American I have ever demeaned. We, here, in Canada, are the most willingly-cuckolded citizens of this sweet planet.

So this is it.

Despite this awful truth, it was fairly exasperating when, on my way to the gym today, the same road crew was still there.  Which crew?  Oh, sorry.  The same crew who have parked themselves on the very intersection where my facility is located, and who haven’t moved for several weeks.  Sometimes I can cross at the light directly across from where my gym is.  Other times, I’ll be walking towards my gym and there’ll be a “Sidewalk Closed” sign right at the light.  Therefore, and needlessly, I have to cross over horizontally, cross vertically, then cross over horizontally again to get to my gym.  I’m not kidding when I state that there have been times that the sign has been on one side of the street before I get to the gym, and has moved to the other side after I’ve finished my workout.

What are they doing?  What all road crews do: closing off lanes with traffic cones.  Hiring flagpeople.  Bringing in equipment.  Hauling out a jackhammer once in a while to pollute the air with an inhuman, maddening din.  Digging up the road, doing something, and then repaving the road.  But most of all: ensuring there are plenty of men who are hole standing.

It might sound a bit dirty, but believe me, it’s not.  You know exactly what I’m talking about.  

The standers of the hole.

I can’t take credit for this term.  I first encountered it while watching an episode of the US version of the series “Shameless,” which I haven’t seen in a decade, but this particular bit of accuracy and brilliance has stuck with me and I’ve used it ever since.  There’s no other way to describe the many, many people who stand around a hole that has been dug while one guy (or maybe a gal, but usually not) is down there.  And I don’t mean “Road To Wigan Pier”-type coal mining depths, either; I mean about six feet, maybe ten, with the hole occupier in a space entirely visible to those standing above who are gawking down at him.  I don’t know what they’re all doing apart from hole standing, but when the question was thrown out there online, here’s one answer that was posted:

Civil engineer here, I’m the one standing around so let me explain what you may be looking at.

As an engineer I do field inspections of road and municipal works, what that entails is me standing around watching the work that is being performed. The only hands on work I do is get my tape measure out or take notes. It’s not glamorous but I have a good time with the workers on site and enjoy being outside instead of on the computer.

Now as for other personnel you may see there’s lots of possible explanations. One being that construction companies hire labourers to help them run tools or other tasks that make another workers job easier and more efficient. When you are paying an electrician >$100/hr you don’t want him running back and forth from his truck when you can pay a labourer ~$30/hr (labourer would see about $20 of that) to do it.

There’s also safety concerns that require people to stand around. When there’s any work in an enclosed space you need pesonnel standing over and watching the hole AT ALL TIMES in case of an emergency. An example of this is sewer work. For every 2 guys you see above there may be 2 below doing work.

So as you can see there’s many possible explanations, there are of course lazy guys on the site, and I hate to say it, but you’re more likely to find those types in a unionized labour environment, but usually construction contracts have deadlines and you don’t want to be dicking around because missing those deadlines can be VERY expensive. But the opposite is true, some contracts have long timelines and the workers can afford to stand around and shoot the shit, they are getting paid regardless but good contractors will have ‘teams’ that can be moved around to work on other projects.

Just as I suspected.  

He’s stringing together endless paragraphs and meandering sentences to cover for his own boys in the biz, but all of this is desperate window dressing to say: Actually, they’re doing fuck-all and getting paid for it.

There was no hole in the road today, but there were definitely enough labourers standing around as someone…did something.  Carrying a shovel or walking around with tools may have been involved, but it was essentially a few flagpeople watching cars go by on the downtown street, and a few dudes in yellow coveralls and helmets talking to each other.  I decided to find out for myself.

I approached one of them.  “Hi!”  

He turned around.

“Hey,” he replied.

“So,” I asked with a giant grin on my face, “what are you guys doing?”

“Just, uh, sort of cleaning up stuff around here.”  Those were his words, verbatim. Cleaning up stuff? All of this was to clean up stuff for countless weeks, on the same street corner, with heavy machinery and a large crew?

I nodded, and continued smiling.  “Now, didn’t you guys do this two summers ago, in exactly this place?”

Because they most certainly had.  I remember the summer of 2022 all too well for my own liking, and one thing I recall without hesitation is how nearly every trip to the gym had been characterized by an identical road crew, in the exact same spot, on the precisely same bits of pavement, doing entirely the same thing.  This, too, went on for weeks, complete with having to criss-cross the street different times during the day for no apparent reason at all, and how absolutely infuriated I was back then at how nonsensical it all seemed to be.  It wasn’t a BC Hydro crew, they weren’t repairing water mains; they were instead a city crew digging up that very patch of Pender Street and then repaving it.

He was totally deadpan: “Yeah, I think so.”

My phony, impromptu-investigative journalist smile grew even wider. “So, this is basically a make-work project.”

“Uh, yeah.”

There was no way he could have answered so bluntly, so honestly.  I wonder if he had heard me properly, or if he understood what the term meant, but I got my answer: they were doing NOTHING.  No, wait, they were definitely doing two things for sure, which was burning up taxpayer dollars, and creating nonsensical construction projects in order to justify their bloated annual budget.

Guess how long it took to put this together.

That’s a picture of Jim Deva Plaza, which is very close to where I live.  I mentioned it previously in my article about Davie Street, and how it was the playground for many of the displaced junkies from East Vancouver during Covid.  It’s located on Bute Street at Davie, and Bute used to be a through street for cars until they decided to allocate half of it (meaning, half a block) to putting together this plaza for pedestrians only.  Construction began in 2015, the year that I moved here.  

What do you see?  Read through the plan for this plaza, and take a look at the budget indicated within this document, and then take another look at my picture.  

It is half a city block, with coloured paint on the concrete ground and a tacky-looking large pink megaphone with a turquoise centre.

Over two million dollars were set aside by the city to do this.  Do you want to know how long it took to do this?

One year.  With many, many crews doing absolutely nothing.  I should know; I currently walk through there sometimes several times a day, and during its construction, I was still able to walk through there, because nothing was being done.  

I want you to compare the way Vancouver gets things done–with large crews and gigantic budgets, a relatively small population and fairly decent infrastructure–to the length of time it took to build this modern wonder of engineering.

My city is an eye-roller for more reasons than I care to list in this fairly short piece, but rest assured, I’m going to address many of the ha-ha aspects of Vancouver in upcoming essays.  It’s one of the lightbulb moments I had in the last couple of days while replenishing my brain and body.  I may have written some (paid) fluffy pieces about this place elsewhere, but this is my site, and I’m going to talk about what nobody else seems to be talking about: the fact that we are sinking in a very figurative way, we are imploding, we are a disgrace, and yet the citizens of Vancouver–who can be easily recognized by their howling passivity and grudging acceptance of the unacceptable while anonymously kvetching about those things, hoping someone else will have the courage to address them–prefer to delude themselves into believing that living here is about nothing except the mountains and the ocean and the outdoors.  I doubt the roughly 3,000 homeless and unsheltered people here thank their lucky stars for the beautiful natural wonders surrounding them.

Here’s something you need to know, Vancouverites: it’s geographic luck.  If you were to leave the topography behind and just rip the city from its moorings and plonk it in, say, Northern Saskatchewan, including all of its politicians, its park board, and its civic priorities, it would be the most controversial, repugnant, trashy, highly-lampooned place in the country, if not the continent altogether.  My goal is to get out of here, but until I manage to pull off such an impossible feat in a country where whatever housing exists is at unaffordable rates even for high-figure income earners, I’m here and I’ll spill.  

I am so glad I went to the gym today.  

UPDATED October 2…

It seems the city just can’t stop paying construction crews and civic workers to do a boatload of goddamn nothing.

Take a look at the picture below:

This has been going on since about May, meaning the entire summer was made thoroughly unpleasant for visitors to Vancouver…and me.

That’s the intersection of Bute and Robson, so just a few blocks up from the hole-standing account I initially wrote about. This is smack-dab in the heart of downtown, and in a very busy shopping district (well, for tourists…who on earth is able to afford $400 yoga pants, or a slab of twenty-dollar cheesecake?). I walk past this as infrequently as possible, although it’s tough when my gym is directly down the street.

Here’s another angle, so you can see the mayhem, the work, the toil, the perspiration, the effort, the back-busting construction taking place:

Are they replacing ancient water mains to ensure adequate supply to the urban core? Building a community garden? Installing a roadside amusement park? Guess again: it’s Vancouver. Read on…

I had to bypass this nonsense of a project today, and couldn’t help myself; approaching city workers and demanding to know what, if anything, they are doing with their time has become a new hobby. As I waited to cross the street–the traffic light has long been shut down, so it’s been a series of bored flag people waving pedestrians and vehicles along–I decided to actually talk to the flag person holding a STOP / GO sign. If this is in any way accurate, she would be far better off upgrading her position so she, too, can sit in a front loader with a cup of coffee and a cigarette, because that’s exactly what one of the guys on the job was doing.

“What is this? What is this?” I asked her, somewhat impolitely, making a sweeping motion with my arm.

She didn’t really make eye contact with me or reply, just watched oncoming traffic as she held me back from crossing over.

“This has been going on for months,” I said. “What are they doing?”

“They’re, like, building a bike lane.”

A bike lane?

“A bike lane?!” I could not conceal my disgust. “All of this for a bike lane? Months and months for a section of the street reserved for bicycles? Down busy Robson Street, which nobody even bikes down to begin with?”

“Yeah…” She seemed somewhat embarrassed, knowing exactly how pointless this endless disturbance was. “They’ll be working on it for a year.” She waved me along. “You can cross now.”

“Vancouver. VANCOUVER,” I spat. She nodded in agreement. As I crossed I had to reference the little factoid I linked to somewhere above:

“Meanwhile, the Chinese built a 55-kilometre bridge in nine years!”

One could argue, as some have, that the construction of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge was very likely fraught with countless casualties, as the Chinese aren’t exactly known for cuddly, Vancouverish work ethics and conditions in order to increase efficiency and output. To that, I argue that ironwork and bridge construction is a naturally dangerous occupation, and one knows what they’re getting into. Heck, in 1958, even Vancouver couldn’t get it right.

But one year for a bike lane? This has to be wrong information; I don’t think the flag person actually knew what was going on, just like the guys instructed to destroy the street and close off sidewalks likely have no idea, either. Give me bucket of paint, a brush, and a few traffic cones: there. There’s your bike lane, and I could do it in a month without any help. I guess I’m not grokking the amount of shoveling, digging, tractors, front loaders, drilling, and total interference this has caused to a pretty major intersection. My own street has a bike lane. You know what it consists of? A big line separating it from the cars with the words “BIKE LANE” painted on it periodically, and sign declaring the same.

This is my city. And my city is a laughingstock and doesn’t know it.