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VANCOUVER - CANADA'S NEW ORLEANS?
What has been exposed of the Great American Way in New Orleans all last week, the plights of their homeless and poor left behind with no doctors, priests or social workers (but a kissy-faced latecomer George Bush) is the shame of their nation and its guilt for its classism, elitism and racism.

Vancouver, with its unemployed, its binners (who St Todd of the Sun would have you believe are all squeaky-happy) and welfare cheques of $510 a month (still not changed despite whopping provincial surpluses!) is not so different from New Orleans. Those poor and homeless among us would be the first to suffer any upheaval and would suffer the longest because we as a people have already shown our indifference in allowing this social situation to have collapsed into such hopelessness and despair.

They may not be starving to death just now but they are suffering, and the diseases and malnutrition they experience are all quietly contributing to their insanity and thoughts of suicide. The rage we see expressed now in New Orleans by those left behind is the rage we will see here soon enough when the earthquake or some equally devastating natural catastrophe visits us.

If the Vancouver police, the RCMP and other front line establishment functionaries could manage to stop bullying the poor and the native aboriginals long enough to understand their circumstance of destitution, a stitch of their compassion might introduce into our whole social mosaic that new thread of humanity which would absolutely preclude from happening here what is now unravelling in the southern states and before the eyes of a stunned world. What used to be the most spirited and fun place in the richest country on the globe - its Mardi Gras the very icon of joyous parading - has metamorphosed into a city of gloom and floating fecal matter and now is forever stigmatized as America's unholy shame.

The sneermeisters of Vancouver's elitists might be wise to get a good whiff of the new New Orleans and as they ask themselves, "Isn't that familiar? Smells really familiar," they may discover it's the same stench of that rationale which explains why so many Vancouverites are blithely charity-jogging over the bodies of the homeless.