Matt Gurney: What giving up on Canada might look like
Those with the means may not leave. But their money might. Canada will turn into a nice cottage or country club — a place to relax, for those with the means.
By: Matt Gurney
I’m going to indulge in a bit of writerly self-indulgence and start this column with an anecdote that isn’t totally off the mark in terms of what is to come, but isn’t the most natural fit either. But it’s simply too delightful for me to ignore. Over the last couple of days, while navigating a bit of a family situation, I’ve had to put in some serious road miles. I’ve been driving back and forth quite a bit over the last week, along the same route. And I noticed something funny. Something that I was, in fact, extremely supposed to notice. It was an orange traffic cone, with a fresh strip of reflective tape around it, sitting in the middle of a fairly busy four-way highway intersection in rural Ontario, a few hours from Toronto.
But I only noticed the top part of it. That’s all that you can see since the cone has been dropped into a pothole that has got to be at least a foot and a half deep. I’ve seen some pretty torn-up roads over the last few years. I’ve written whole columns about how bad Toronto’s roads have gotten. But I have not seen anything like this. It’s like God reached down from heaven and ripped the most stubbornly rooted weed in history out of the intersection, taking a shockingly deep chunk of asphalt with it.
And rather than fix it, the road guys just dropped a pylon into it so that drivers can carefully navigate around the pothole in the literal centre of the busy highway intersection.
So that’s bad. But let me tell you when things got worse, but also somehow more hilarious. Like I said, I’ve had to be driving back and forth quite a bit over the last week. I’ve probably been through that intersection a dozen times. And every time I’ve been through it, I’ve stopped to look and see if anything had changed. On my most recent journey, something had indeed changed.
The shockingly deep pothole is still there. But someone had taken the pylon away.