YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE REPUBLIC OF EAST VANCOUVER

If it seemed like the Vancouver police would have yarded in the department
tank, if they had one, when they made their move on the Da Kine Smoke and
Beverage Shop on Commercial Drive earlier this month, it might be because
Commercial Drive can seem like a whole different country.

In their minds, the police weren't just doing the usual -- devastating
international crime lords by keeping a guy in a Cowichan sweater from
eating a hash brownie. They were establishing a beach head in a foreign land.

Which had to up the level of police-excitability.

Not to mention the fact that the adrenaline always runs high when debuting
your spring line of balaclavas.

Kevin Potvin, who runs Magpie Magazines on the Drive, says that Commercial
and East Van might seem like a different country because it's the most
diverse neighbourhood in North America.

And that's official.

When an American academic group gauged 200 neighbourhoods in North America,
"East Vancouver was number one for having the highest range of diversity,"
Potvin says.

"In their assessment of diversity quotient, it was ethnic background,
economic station in life and there was another thing as well."

That would be the Hairdo Diversity Index (HDI). Every hairdo from the past
250 years -- from the Robespierre to the beehive to the pageboy to the
Mohawk -- lives on Commercial Drive, which is why it's been designated an
official hairdo preservation site by the UN.

With electoral reform in the air -- from wards to proportional
representation -- it's only natural to consider the possibility of an
independent East Van.

It wouldn't be the world's first or only smallish republic.

"I was in Bologna, Italy, in July," Potvin says, "and about an hour away
from Bologna, in Northern Italy, is San Marino, which is a fully
independent republic perched on top of a hillside. It's population is, I
think, something like 20,000 or 30,000.

"Now, East Vancouver, depending on where you draw the boundaries, is around
250,000."

Which means that the Republic of East Van would have another republic that
- -- if it had to -- it could take, possibly by deploying the staff of Nick's
Spaghetti House on their break. An important geopolitical consideration.

Potvin cites social critic Jane Jacobs' latest bestseller, Dark Age Ahead,
as a good reason to consider a sovereign East Van.

"Jane Jacobs is echoing Hunter S. Thompson from 20 years before when she
says that the only kind of government that actually works, in terms of
being democratically responsive to its constituents, is something not much
bigger than what we have for municipal governments."

Kevin Potvin on the Republic of East Vancouver

- - Legislators: Pick them randomly, like you do people for jury duty, for
two-year stints.

- - Flag: Possibly patterned after one Potvin once had designed, with "a gear
and bicycles and cups of coffee all over the place and a marijuana leaf and
so on."

- - Relations with the U.S.: Impose trade sanctions against.

- - National defence: Mutual-defence treaties, possibly with Russia and San
Marino.

- - Money: "Harry Rankin on the 10 java bill . . . Jimmy Pattison could be on
the 1,000 java bill."

- - Anthem: Not written yet, but likely to be the first national anthem to
use four-letter words, mention transgendered rights and have the stirring
refrain:

What are you looking at?

I'm walking here;

I'm walking here.

What are you looking at?

Is this bratwurst organic?

If East Van does declare its independence, it will already have a national
newspaper.

Potvin has been publishing a biweekly called The Republic of East Vancouver
since November 2000. Issue 97 is hot off the press. Cover story: the police
raid on the Da Kine Smoke and Beverage Shop.