SHOOTING MARS 'HIPPEST' AREA IN VANCOUVER

Young People Moving En Masse To Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood

The Fortune Happiness Chinese restaurant is just up the street from
where I live weekdays in Vancouver. Weekends I return to the
comparative idyll of Central Saanich, where we don't have gangland
slayings, but where the mooing of cows sometimes keeps me awake at
nights.

Early Thursday morning, a couple of masked gunmen burst into the
Fortune Happiness and started shooting with automatic weapons. They
left behind carnage. Two dead (as I write this) and six seriously injured.

"Heinous crime," screamed the front page of the Province newspaper.
"Gang-style slayings" blared the front page of the Vancouver Sun over
a frame-grab of one of our TV images -- a distraught woman on the
sidewalk outside the restaurant.

Early yesterday morning, before heading in to work, I walked up the
street and past the restaurant. The media had left, and one lone
police cruiser was stationed outside on Broadway. There was yellow
police tape around the front of the restaurant.

The front glass door was smashed open. I peeked inside. Tables and
chairs were scattered everywhere. A small, brutal tornado had passed
through -- one fuelled by machine-guns.

There are scores of these small restaurants along Broadway - and I
have used many of them. Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Thai,
pizza places. Across the street there's a Subway restaurant, and just
up the block a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Directly across from the
Fortune Happiness is a Mac's convenience store where I regularly buy
milk.

On Thursday, radio and TV reports shorthanded the Mount Pleasant
neighborhood as a place of transients, and an area once popular with
prostitutes. If you didn't live there you'd think of it as seedy and
poor and somewhere to be avoided.

In fact, it's a neighborhood in transition. Main Street, where I've
lived these past five years, was singled out by Air Canada's trendy En
Route magazine recently as the hippest street in Vancouver. Young
people who can't afford houses or the super-pricey condos in Yaletown
are moving en masse into the neighborhood.

A friend's son and his wife -- and their one-year-old daughter -- live
in a nice apartment three blocks away from the shooting. Artists'
lofts mingle with sad low-rise apartment buildings.

There's a small park one block away from the shooting. I drove by it
Thursday night. Scores of kids were playing there on a gorgeous
Vancouver summer evening.

Though police hadn't found a motive yesterday, it's a fair bet it's
gang-related. Which means drug-related. There's big money to be made
on marijuana, on cocaine and on heroin, and there's turf to be occupied.

The police instantly used the slayings to call for more police
officers to fight the growing gang problem in the city. Prime Minister
Stephen Harper pushed for two anti-gun bills to pass quickly through
Parliament. The bills would stiffen jail terms and bail for
gun-related crimes.

Sometimes, in our newsroom, we become somewhat blase about gang
crimes. It's about bad guys shooting bad guys, so the stories usually
don't get huge play. As long as the good guys don't get caught in the
crossfire, that is.

A drive-by shooting. A gang member killed in a karaoke club. One dead
and four injured in a congee and noodle house. An early-morning
shooting in a known hangout for gang members. We show the images on
the morning news, but by supper-hour we've moved onto stories that
really affect the majority of our viewers -- higher taxes, the
environment, usurious gas prices.

But this is now getting too close to home. Not just for me, but for an
entire city that wants to be picture-postcard-perfect for the world in
2010, but is increasingly becoming too big, too dangerous, too much
like old-time Chicago. Gangland slayings. Machine-gun massacres. Yikes!

The Province did a great sidebar on the gangs now "terrorizing"
Vancouver. They're from every ethnic persuasion. They're The UN gang,
Hells Angels (all of them millionaires), Indo-Canadian gangs,
Vietnamese gangs, Independent Soldiers, Latin-American gangs and Big
Circle Boys.

This latter group purportedly controls about 80 per cent of the heroin
that comes into Vancouver. If you confront them, they bring in a hit
man from Asia. He (or she?) does the killing, and he or she is back in
Hong Kong the next day.

In a newspaper report yesterday Robert Gordon, director of the School
of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, said that organized crime
has become so powerful, so brazen here that government isn't up to the
task of tackling the problem.

I believe it.

Governments out here on the West Coast have shown they can't handle
poverty, homelessness, beggars on the streets of Vancouver and
Victoria, and growing urban decay, so I don't believe they have a hope
of combatting these guys.

They'll whistle while Vancouver burns. They're good at that. And the
courts will continue to dole out soft sentences. And the gangs will
become ever more brazen and dangerous.

Robert Gordon said something else. Because of the Fortune Happiness
slayings, there's likely to be a retaliatory event within a day or
two, followed by another retaliatory event.

I hope I'm not sitting in one of my favorite restaurants on Main
Street or Broadway when that happens.

Ian Haysom divides his week between Vancouver and Central Saanich. He
is the news director of Global B.C.