Raging Against the Machine

High-end Vancouver, like its high-end hockey team, has alienated working-class fans to the point of anger.

If you believe Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, as well as a commentator for this online publication, the rioters who set fire to parts of downtown Vancouver last week after the Canucks' Stanley Cup loss were mindless, unCanadian hooligans. Unequivocal dismissals are pithy – hardliners always offer the best quotations. I don't actually know what started the riots, but dismissing any social phenomenon is more lazy than tough. Worse, such dismissiveness mirrors a dissonance between the tranquil image Vancouver exports and the lie the city has become.

Gregor Robertson lives in a comfortable 23rd Avenue house one block west of Oak Street. Until the mid-1980s, Oak was the division between the city's wealthy and middle classes. Moving east from Oak to Cambie, Main, and Fraser, each major north-south street was a further step toward working-class homes, immigrants, and the rundown schools that defined Vancouver as an affordable city at the continental edge.

That Vancouver's western peninsula was also spectacular did not alter its grungy identity. The Canucks were part of this grunge. To compete with large markets in Chicago and New York in a pre-salary cap National Hockey League required overachievement from blue-collar grinders. Stan Smyl, Darcy Rota, Harold Snepsts, Tiger Williams, and Powell River's Gary Lupul were neither swift nor snipers. Even the King, Richard Brodeur, was a castoff.

This was the bliss of 1982: the workers from a third-class industrial port sticking it to the plutocratic dynasties of Reagan America. If not for Snepsts' devastating turnover at the end of regulation in Game One, the momentum might not have shifted toward the Islanders; Thomas Gradin, remember, staked the Canucks to an early 2-0 lead in that game. And had King Richard's blood not stained his crease after taking a Dan Daoust slapshot to his ear early the next season, the Canucks could have continued surging, even with Edmonton in ascent.

Despite being swept, Mayor Mike Harcourt threw a parade for our team. (They were losers, but they were our losers!) The triumph coursed through an underdeveloped downtown, everybody singing and still waving plain white towels ecstatically. Nothing glamorous: a harbour of floating timber and barges loaded with sawdust; an old mining town of mac jackets and mullets, mingling with fatigued natives and hippie draft dodgers living in a soaked provincial refuge, unknown to the world because there was not much to know. The Beachcombers was the rage.

Contrast that city toasting its losers with the decadence that turned Vancouver from a forgotten port to a poor man's Hollywood. There is no undeveloped property anywhere – every nook and niche claimed by condominiums, stadia, coffee, and casinos; timbermen's jackets replaced by adorable Lululemon asses, the costume of a leisure class with time to shape their figures; hippies gone wealthy, local festivals marketed worldwide, mountains transformed to Monte Carlo; the mines – though still economic bedrock – obscured by film crews and marijuana monopolies.

Who are the Canucks of this city? A cosmopolitan Franco-European crew, bankrolled by a mining titan beloved by Bill Clinton, a roster adorned by cranky $5 million stars who cannot thrive without serene pre-game walks to meditate along the seawall, and whose only local boy hardly plays. If I'm a second- or third-generation diehard fan watching Tim Thomas dive and lunge for every puck, the way you expect of a blue-collar Michigander from a dying (actually dead) industrial town, it's tough not to be outraged by Roberto Luongo's blueblooded butterfly or the east-west evasiveness of a Sedin cycle. If you are going to look so pretty on the ice, you better win.