Memo to Vancouver hockey rioters: Get a grip.
Last night, the Boston Bruins broke millions of Canadians’ hardened hockey hearts with what really was a well-deserved win in the Stanley Cup final. The street riots in downtown Vancouver began within minutes, making headlines as far away as India and Australia and gaining prominent play on the New York Times and CNN websites. The Washington Post carried a photo of a fan waving a Canadian flag beside a burning pickup truck.
The riots occurred 17 years and a day after 50,000 to 70,000 fans trashed parts of their city in response to the Canucks’ last near-miss.
This is not the Vancouver I know. To say that it’s time to get a few things in perspective doesn’t begin to cut it.
Everyone in our office wanted to see Lord Stanley’s cup come home to Canada. But losing the Stanley Cup, or even winning it, was not the most important thing that happened in Vancouver in the last 10 to 30 years.
Vancouver is where researchers formally unveiled the medical advances that led to the first treatments for HIV/AIDS. Some delegates to the 11th International Conference on AIDS in 1996 had been told long before the meeting that they only had weeks or months to live. By the time they got onsite, the drugs were working and the virus could no longer be detected in their bloodstreams.
Vancouver hosted the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, one of the first international meetings to take a close look at the economic, environmental, and social impacts of rapid urbanization. Thirty years later, the World Urban Forum drew attention to the “social time bomb” of a billion people living in slums around the world.
Vancouver has set itself the audacious goal of becoming the world’s greenest city by 2020 and wowed the global meetings industry by opening a breathtaking, LEED Platinum convention centre in 2010.
Vancouver is home to the incomparable Wosk Centre for Dialogue, a facility whose very design and atmosphere pretty much demand that participants conduct themselves with respect and dignity, make good use of their time onsite, and generate lasting results afterwards.
This is not to suggest that Vancouverites should riot for the billion people who live in slums or the tens of millions of orphans who’ve lost both parents to AIDS. Much better for them to take the content and urgency of any number of events their city has hosted, add the tone of their local conference or convention centre, and get a life.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious (repeat after me, now)…the Canucks had a great season, but it’s a game. How can we be moved to senseless action by a sports score, but remain blissfully silent about problems that are huge, scary, and utterly preventable?