Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe Chapter 11, Part Four.

    Chapter 11 - Part Four.


    After the renovation of Eight Oaks Housing Co-op were finished, a mega project loomed just outside our building. Liberal premier Gordon Campbell brushed the dust off the plans of his friend, former Social credit premier Bill Van Der Zalm. 'The Zalm' as this conservative premier was called, announced in the late 1980's, that a new Sky Train line would barrel along Cambie Street to Richmond, Vancouver's southern neighbour.
     Many citizens along Cambie Street and near it, opposed this project. The N.D.P. governments of the 1990's buried it. Yet the new premier resurrected this plan. Despite a sizeable opposition to this new project, the Canada Line project went ahead in 2005. When the Vancouver city council approved the new line, it called for the tunnel along Cambie Street to be bored underground. Yet this didn't happen. Instaed the builders of the line went for what was called "'Cut and Cover'.
     The surface covering of Cambie Street was ripped up, and deep trenches were dug to where the building of the tunnels took place. Now huge Komatsus, cranes, and John Deere caterpillars swarmed along Cambie Street. Massive trucks lumbered around the neighbourhood. Noise, filth , potholes and traffic diversions turned Cambie street into a nightmare.
      For me, burdened with walking with a crutch, life became very difficult. Bus stops just vanished overnight. "Can you tell me where the closest bus stop is to my address?" I must have asked the project office's information officer at least three or four times on the phone. 35 stores fled Cambie Street as their customers vanished.
     Dangers lurked around me and others. One day a huge truck lurched into a pothole outside the co-op and drenched me from head to foot. "I've had that happen to me at least twice," a neighbour across the street told me when she heard my story. One Sunday which fell on an April Fool's Day, a security guard on the project refused to move his car, even though I asked him politely to do so. I tried to move around his car and fell on one of my knees. My left knee started to swell up. I rushed to the emergency ward of the Vancouver General Hospital which had been hard hit by Liberal cutbacks.
Yet luckily my kneecap wasn't broken.
       Still, this new project didn't match or disrupt my life, the way the building renovations at Eight Oaks had. "This building of the Canada Line is a big nuisance," one of my neighbours named Dylan said. "But it's nothing compared to the problems that the renovations caused me and my family."
     At the same time as the building of the Canada Line went ahead, there came upheavals at the Unitarian Church. These too caused me problems.