Alexa Middelaer

Berner was charged with four counts: impaired driving causing death, and dangerous driving causing death (for Middelaer’s death), and impaired driving causing bodily harm, and dangerous driving causing bodily harm (for Johanson’s serious injuries). Though she has admitted to driving the car, she has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. The trial is currently taking place in Surrey Provincial Court.

According to various news sources, Berner initially told the police that she had not been drinking and that she had inexplicably lost control of her car. She also said that she had been travelling at a speed not in excess of 60 km/h. After being questioned again about drinking, she allegedly told the officer that she’d had two glasses of wine about three hours before the collision. The officer then conducted a breath sample, for which a blood alcohol reading in excess of .10 was determined.¹  Another media source reported that, in a discussion with undercover officers, “Berner admitted to at least three glasses of wine before driving that afternoon”.²

Carol Ann Berner (Photo: Ric Ernst, PNG)

It was also reported that engineer Steve MacInnis testisfied to the court that, according to the sensing diagnostic module in her car, Berner had been driving as fast as 91km per hour immediately before the accident.³  The speed limit where the accident took place is 50 km/h.

You know the old disclaimer – nothing has been proven in court, so Berner is entitled to be assumed innocent until proved guilty. That’s a principle that I agree with. These things should not be tried in the media, for everyone should be entitled to a fair and impartial trial, lest we inadvertently convict the innocent.

It’s easy to despise Berner. She’s admitted to driving the car that killed the girl. She’s admitted she was drinking. She apparently lied about the speed at which she was travelling. Based on the information I’ve read, I can easily conclude that if Berner had any moral integrity she would plead guilty and spare Middelaer’s family a lot of extra agony (and taxpayers a lot of extra money), instead of throwing the dice onto the legal craps table in the hope of getting off on a technicality.

I’ve been vaguely tempted to attend the trial, just once, so that I can see what a creature like Berner looks like up close and in person – to look at her face, maybe look into her eye and try to get a glimpse into the empty soul that I imagine that someone like Berner possesses. It’s easy to imagine Berner as some sort of other, a monster who bears no resemblance to you or me.

I don’t need to do that, however, and not just because I loathe the idea of going to Surrey. I don’t need to go out there because I can find plenty of Carol Ann Berners anywhere I look. At the local school, sitting in her minivan waiting to pick up her kids. At the arena, sitting in the stands with his buddies watching the hockey game. At The Bay, buying birthday presents for her nieces. In the legislature, sitting in the corner office trying to think of a novel way of making the HST look better. Berner has friends, and children, and grandchildren. She likes a steak and a glass of wine. Sound like anyone you know?

(Photo: CBC)

I would suggest that there is one major difference between Carol Ann Berner and the rest of us: Luck. How often have you been to a party and heard the host ask someone about to leave “Are you sure you’re OK to drive?” How often have you heard the target of that question say “You know, you’re right. Maybe I better leave my car here and take a cab”? Yes, it happens. But it doesn’t happen often enough. Just go stand outside any pub after work. The parking lot is jammed with cars that won’t be there at closing time. Most of the people are consuming some amount of alcohol, and most are driving. Most will be lucky and will not run anyone over on the way home.

Some of the defenders of a little light drinking and driving argue that in most cases, the law is too strict. It is perfectly safe to have a drink or two. Just look at the evidence: all those people are leaving pubs after a couple of drinks, and kids aren’t being killed every day. It’s a seductive argument to those who have a personal stake in believing it. But consider this report compiled by Applied Research and Evaluation Services (ARES) at the University of British Columbia: ⁴

Over the eight-year period between 1999 and 2006, it is estimated that impaired driving killed 9,698 persons, injured 572,187, and caused damage to 1,891,001 vehicles in all crashes, translating into 1,010 fatal crashes, 391,123 injury-only crashes and 1,244,079 property-damage only (PDO) crashes, totaling 1,643,284 crashes in all.. In turn, this cost Canadians between $15.5 billion (Real Dollar Estimate model) and $90.2 billion (Willingness to Pay model) dollars, depending on the costing model and assumptions used. To put this another way, that represents a cost of between about $469.00 and $2,726.00 per Canadian.

In an average year in Canada, impaired driving killed 1,212 persons, injured 71,532, and caused damage to 236,375 vehicles, translating into 1,010 fatal crashes, 48,890 injury-only crashes and 155,510 property-damage only (PDO) crashes, totaling an average of 205,410 crashes in all. In turn, on average, this cost Canadians between $1.90 billion (Real Dollar Estimate model) and $11.28 billion (Willingness to Pay model) dollars, depending on the costing model and assumptions used. To put this another way, that represents a cost of between about $59.00 and $341.00 per Canadian.

Turning to 2006, the most recent year of data, it is estimated that, for Canada, impaired driving, including impairment by drugs other than alcohol, resulted in 1,278 fatalities, 75,374 injuries and, including property-damage-only, a total of 216,480 crashes, at a cost of between $2.2 and $12.8 billion dollars, depending upon the costing model used.

I would hazard a guess that when Carol Ann Berner got into her Oldsmobile Intrigue that day, she didn’t think much about whether or not she should be hurtling down the street in two tons of steel with alcohol in her blood. Now she’s telephoning undercover cops who she thinks are her new friends, telling them that she feels like killing herself.⁵

What happened to Berner could happen to anyone who drinks and drives. Think about that before you turn the key.

1. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/06/03/bc-alexa-middelaer-carol-berner-trial.html?ref=rss
2. http://www.bclocalnews.com/news/96424159.html
3. http://www.theprovince.com/news/Berner+travelling+almost+twice+legal+limit+before+struck+killed+Alexa+Middelaer+court+hears/3168247/story.html
4. http://madd.ca/english/research/estimating_presence.pdf
5. http://news.globaltv.com/world/Officer+details+Berner+disturbing+state+mind/3163452/story.html

It often seems that pretty much everything is crap these days, including the designer brand crap. Recently I bought a small hand trowel from a large home supplies super–discount-mega-store that shall remain nameless. It’s a metal-bladed trowel, with a heavy, hefty plastic handle. After just a few uses – digging small holes in soft garden soil – the blade snapped off of the handle. It seems that those two heavy-duty parts were joined together with a piece of plastic of such quality and robustness that it might alternately have been used to house a small plastic gold ring in a ten cent bubble gum machine.

None of this is new, of course. So why am I griping about it now? Sometimes I find a product of such exceedingly low quality I just have to talk about it.

For the past few days I have been undertaking a few upgrades to my living room. Specifically, I’ve been repainting the walls and ceiling and covering the the old floor (comprised mostly of a hodgepodge of plywood, cedar shingles, and mortar) with new laminate.

In order to facilitate these upgrades, I purchased a few devices to make things easier. One was a pole to extend my paint roller. While using it to roll paint onto the ceiling (a perfectly reasonable application of the tool, I’m sure you’ll agree), the flimsy plastic joint that holds the pole to its threaded end snapped, in the same manner as the trowel. Except that the trowel did not bounce off of my head and leave a paint smear across my forehead as it fell to pieces.

Most galling, however, was the performance of the kneepads I bought. I’m getting a little too old (and perhaps, therefore, osteopathic)  to be crawling around on my knees on surfaces that aren’t beach sand, so investing in these seemed a good idea while installing laminate flooring. The first thing I did was roll out the foam vapour barrier. There I was, crawling around on layer of foam, the plastic caps on the fronts of the kneepads protecting my knees, when I heard a crack. At first I thought the foam was collapsing under my weight, or from the force of the hard plastic caps. But no. The crack was the plastic on the kneepad breaking.

This is a tool that is supposed to protect my knees. It’s a bad sign when the safety equipment breaks when it is pressed against… a hard surface? No. It’s essentially bubble wrap. Bubble wrap broke my kneepads! To make matters worse, the plastic on both kneepads cracked within five minutes, and pieces fell off. The resultant sharp remaining shards poking out of the pads kept tearing my vapour barrier. I had to seal the tears in the vapour barrier with duct tape, and for good measure put some on the kneepads too.

The manufacturer very wisely declined to affix a corporate logo to the kneepads, so I can’t steer you away from them by name. But here’s a picture, sans tape. Don’t buy them!

Though I don’t yet know precisely what Demers has written (I have heard him read short excerpts in public appearances), I feel like it is probably a book that I would have liked to have written myself. There are multiple reasons why I haven’t, of course, not least of which is that my affection for the city has been dwindling in more or less direct proportion to the city’s growth. For me to have written a love letter to Vancouver in recent years (without relying heavily on irony) I likely would have had to ingest a strong cocktail of psychiatric medications and have done the actual writing from somewhere like Bismarck, North Dakota, where I couldn’t help but recall the assumed charms of the city of my birth, if only based on comparison.

Until this book came out, I had been contemplating a series of blog entries with the working titles of “The Ten Best Things” and “The Ten Worst Things”, about Vancouver, along with accompanying photographs. It wasn’t my objective to compile a simple set of lists, but to actually write essays about the items on the lists, however tenuously. There have been stumbling blocks, though. The “worst” list hasn’t been too difficult. The challenge there has been in paring the list down to a mere ten. It’s the “best” list I’ve been stuck on. Maybe I’m not thinking creatively enough, but I seem to be stuck at three (and one of them is, technically, not even an official part of Vancouver proper).

Fortunately, Demers has done me the favour of rescuing me from this seemingly doomed plan. Reading his book may not relieve me of my desire to write about Vancouver – it may not even relieve me of the desire to write about it derisively – but I have a feeling that it may inspire me. I don’t think it will inspire me to run around town in a Remax jacket gushing with seemingly lobotomised zeal about sports arenas, strip malls, or shitty t-shirt merchants in Gastown (the latter of which I have heard city councillor Suzanne Anton point to as a desirable example of the kind of urban funkiness to which we should aspire. What the fuck is she smoking?).

No, rather, I think that Demers might inspire me to something higher, nobler, more charitable. “Ten Best and Worst” sounds so black and white, so simplistic, so Lettermanesque. Therefore, I have set a new objective for the coming summer. I will undertake to look at Vancouver through new eyes. I will try to see this city through the eyes of the tourist that I often wish I was, as though I were visiting the city for the first time. I’ll visit Vancouver with the sort of vision that I once experienced when visiting Toronto, or London, or Prague, Berlin, Krakow, Salzburg. Of course, I’ll never be able to “visit” Vancouver completely devoid of preconceptions, but I didn’t go to any of those other cities without some sort of expectations either. The difference, perhaps, is that I went to them with at least some willingness to look with open eyes. I was looking for the unknown, the unexpected. I was looking for adventure, and often found it. In Vancouver, I’ve fallen into the lazy habit of focussing on what I already know and despise.

So this is my mission between now and the end of August: to be an inexperienced visitor in my own city. At least twice a month, I will put a tourist map in my pocket, hang a camera around my neck, consult Lonely Planet Vancouver, and then set out to see what this city is all about, looking at every intersection, every building, every puke encrusted alley, as if I’d never seen them before.

Don’t get me wrong – I have no intention of faking an arrival at the airport and then spending time in the same tourist traps that exist identically in every large city in North America. I doubt I’ll set foot in a mall the whole time. But I’ll visit the neighbourhoods slowly, casually, alertly, virginally, looking for the unique, the humour, the sad, the pathetic, the beautiful. I just hope I don’t get taken for an elderly cruise ship passenger and get mugged.

One Last Rant Before I Go All Touristy

Before I head out on this mission, I must make one last habitual gripe about Vancouver, perhaps just to clear the gullet before I take a vacation from my adored scepticism for this town.

I’m sitting in the Vancouver Public Library. It’s a building that I feel like I’d have a hard time appreciating as a tourist. I can’t imagine stepping off of the stupid imitation San Francisco streetcar (a crappy open-air bus painted red with a streetcar bell mounted on it – attention city boosters: this sort of imitation is the sincerest form of provincialism) onto Homer Street and exclaiming “Oh! What a lovely example of Roman architecture. Take my picture, Blanche!”.

I remember, somewhat fondly, the old Vancouver Public Library on Burrard Street. It was turned into a record store when the new Coastal Colosseum was opened. Yes, it was dark, dank, and smelly. Yes, the elevator was slow and jerky so most people used the convenient and central stairwell. Yes, there was limited space for books so sometimes if you wanted a particular title you’d have to fill out a slip and wait while the librarian went to the basement to retrieve it for you. On the other hand, one could easily get a blowjob in the basement washroom while waiting for the title in question.

Then the Colosseum opened. The designers of the place must have been a little drunk during the planning sessions. The elevators are slow and the stairwells are often locked, so using the the escalators is best, but they were installed so that on every floor you have to walk in a circle to get to the next escalator, forcing patrons to walk through departments in which they are not interested. How did that get approved? Even The Bay doesn’t make customers walk through the Underwear department to get to the escalator to Hats and Wallets. Then there are the washrooms. Tiny. I can’t speak for the women’s, but the men’s has one stall and two urinals. The urinals have a nice privacy plate between them so that one doesn’t accidentally glimpse someone else’s penis, but the urinals are jammed into a corner and are mounted so close together that you practically have to stand on the next guy’s foot to take a leak. If he shakes too hard you have to wipe your shoe off on the way out. And, if the guy in the corner finishes first he has to wait for the other guy to finish before he can back out, for the sink counter is so close behind that there’s no room to squeeze through without an accidental goosing. The washrooms are wheelchair accessible, but I suspect that a wheelchair user might have to back his chair in or risk getting stuck trying to turn around.

In a big new building, you might think that they cramped up the washrooms to ensure room for books, but no. They put in expandable shelves. Now, if you want a particular title, you have to fill out a slip and wait while the librarian operates the moving shelves and retrieves it for you.

There are some seemingly great additions to the library. One is workstations with light and power for laptops. Another is private meeting rooms that can be booked for half hour blocks, but can’t be booked in advance, so it’s pretty easy to get one when you need it. There are two on each floor. Unfortunately, they put a wall around them, but no ceiling, so the other library patrons are forced to listen to all the babble and laughter that takes place in these meetings.

The biggest irritation about working in the library, though, has little to do with the building. It’s the other clients. In my day, if you tried to whisper to someone, the librarian would come by and shush you. Now, you have to listen to barely concealed cellphone conversations. Most – but not all – users have the decency to put their phones on silent, or vibrate. But then they answer them. And talk! Generally, few users can be found in the stacks looking for books these days. Rather, the stacks are full of people talking on cellphones.

Recently, I was here working and my deskmate, a young woman, had her cellphone sitting on the desk. About every two minutes it would vibrate, rattling on the desk until she picked it up. She would reply to a text message and put it down again. Then one time it vibrated and she answered an incoming call. She sat there gabbing into it until I blurted out, quite a bit more loudly than I’d intended, “Could you possibly be more annoying?” Sensing hostility, she shortly thereafter packed up and left, much to my relief.

Today, I have a much quieter deskmate. Here he is:

I don’t mind sleepers, unless they’re snoring (as they sometimes do). But check out this guy’s electrical draw. He’s got three devices plugged into two splitters, and none of them are foreign converters. The laptop and cellphone are charging away, but I’m not sure what the third device is, for it’s hidden in his hat. Judging by the curly power cord, though – not to mention his five o’clock shadow – my guess is that he’s got an electric shaver hidden under that scarf. Based on my previous experiences here, I won’t be at all surprised if at some point he pulls it out and starts shaving. On past visits, I’ve had deskmates pick their noses, pop their zits, apply makeup, and clip their fingernails quite unselfconsciously. Oddly, this sort of thing is apparently acceptable but getting a blowjob in the privacy of the washroom is frowned upon.

On the other hand, the place does have its good points. It has loads of natural lighting and it has a fairly neutral smell. What else does a 21st century library need?

Okay, I’m done ranting. Off I go to touristville. Stay tuned.