Seven Oaks Magazine.

With the fortnight-old death of Canada’s leading myth-maker, Pierre Berton – who somehow rendered heroic the construction of a railway that proved, more than anything, that the easiest way to steal Indian land is to scatter Chinese corpses across it – the time for fantastical legends seems to be coming to an end. In Vancouver, another unreal fairy tale, the marriage of convenience between the thuggish cop-cum-mayor palooka Larry Campbell and the city’s left-leaning municipal machine COPE, seems to be coming to a close, with the man once surreally referred to as “The People’s Campbell” set to announce any day now his decision to run as an independent mayoral candidate with a “team” of community leaders.

Though I never really bought into Berton (I gave up The Last Spike as soon as I realized it wasn’t about a dying volleyball player) I am, ashamedly, one of the many leftists who broke their own moral boycott of all things VPD blue and voted for Campbell in 2002, when the grassroots mobilization around his candidacy – spurred on by the inspirational tenacity of the Woodward’s Squat and the small-is-beautiful/B.C.-is-unceded-Native-territory rage engendered by anti-Olympics fervour – made it seem as though compromise, on this score, might pay big dividends. In other words, the mayor who called for safe injection sites and for the fuzz to ease up on Commercial’s formerly be-leafed Da Kine had already intoxicated me with a dangerous hallucinogen: his mythos-laden candidacy for office.

For two years, Campbell has systematically betrayed each one of the impulses that moved his impressive grassroots support in 2002 to hit the phone trees, welcome mats and ballot boxes that put the man in office. Selling out first on the issue of the Woodsquat, then campaigning openly alongside his provincial namesake Gordon for the Olympics, the mayor also sabotaged the “Four Pillars” program that had initially imploded the right-wing NPA by ensuring that his old buddies the VPD – who Tim Louis, the real voice of principle in municipal politics, has correctly identified as a “Rogue department” – received disproportionate funding and, essentially carte blanche in Vancouver’s most painfully-neglected ghetto.

Some conservative pundits had worried that the Four Pillars plan would turn the Downtown Eastside, already our city’s answer to San Francisco’s infamous “Tenderloin,” into a neighbourhood reminiscent of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. If only. The plan, instead, has rendered homage to Israel’s Occupied Territories, with young, uneducated goons (culled from the VPD’s desperate new recruitment campaign) harassing mostly-indigenous poor people with the omnipresent machinations of the state. Even those with a penchant for irony, who might otherwise thrill to the sight of white people accusing Indians of theft, must shudder at the sight of multiple patrol cars cornering those whose illicit labour keeps the morally-questionable economy of the city’s pawn shops alive.

Two years of Larry Campbell has brought us a Woodward’s building still empty amidst the painful and appalling levels of homelessness in the city, a successful Olympics bid that paid no attention to aboriginal title, instead exacerbating conflicts between indigenous people and sports tourism giants like Sun Peaks resorts, slot machines, an unpopular RAV-line, the contract for the construction of which has gone to a military-industrial company that is also producing bullets for the American occupation of Iraq. Reports of Campbell’s sick head games and adolescent bullying -- readily apparent on television to anyone who has seen the footage of Campbell calling protestors “losers” whose taxes surely can’t be counted on to pay for anything – are virtually absent in print, kept alive almost exclusively by the reporting of the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith. While the mayor’s pathetic policeman’s machismo makes a mockery of progressive principles rooted in feminism, the press not only doesn’t take him to task, but instead spins the bungling, caveman staccato that marks his press conferences and interview style into gold, inventing a “charisma” and “dapper” “style” belied within instants by anyone who actually sees the man try to grunt anything halfway articulate or well thought out in explication of his actions.

The absolute shame attending the end of this particular fairy tale is that Campbell, in essence, is dumping us, rather than the other way around. The Ike to our Tina (only without the genius), and he’s leaving us. After the unsuccessful attempt to oust real, progressive COPE stalwarts like Louis by those more inclined towards Campbell’s agenda, instead of being given his walking papers, Campbell and his ilk are talking loudly about their own campaign amidst pathetic COPE promises that any such thing will go largely unopposed. They’ll instead set their VCRs to record Da Vinci’s Inquest, and come out to applaud whatever harebrained scheme the municipal-level hacks concoct.

If this keeps up, I might have to move in with my little brother in Victoria. At least the bullying, lying, red-faced Campbell in that city isn’t fawned over by self-proclaimed progressives even as he guts and betrays everything they hold dear; and that Campbell only lives there for part of the year.