Compare & Contrast

One of them is the self-satisfied, superficial, supercilious, self-proclaimed centre of the universe where people live the highlife, hug trees and bunnies, and play hard; the other is the satisfied with the self, super serious (yet modest) centre of the oil sands, where people live the highlife, hug their families, hunt, fish and play hard.

Ok, this one fascinated me as it’s a direct quote from a tourism website. “Each February residents count their flower blooms, pointedly reminding snow-bound Canada about our climate. The record is 21 billion blooms in 2010.”

Have you ever heard of anything more self-centred and time wasting as counting your city’s blooms so you can say Nyah to the rest of your countrymen?

Let’s compare places to eat out; no let’s not. Victoria wins. Realistically, Grasslands is almost a better choice than YMM.

The Fairmont Empress Hotel in downtown Victoria claims to serve 750,000 cups of tea a year. That’s just over 2,000 a day, which is about the hourly coffee rate at the Thickwood Tim Hortons.

Victoria is known as the city of the newly wed and nearly dead, Approximately 20 per cent of the population is over 65-years-old and the average age is 51. In Fort McMurray it is 31, which we celebrate by having a birth rate of nearly 35 per 1,000 women.

The statistics for Victoria are not readily available as the birth rate is too low to be of any significance.

And the newlywed part? Apparently Victoria is a popular place for honeymoons, but Fort McMurray is the real baby-making capital of Canada.

Forty-six per cent of people in Victoria walk, bike or use public transportation to get to work. In Fort McMurray it seems like everyone goes to work on a Diversified bus. Nobody walks, and if you own something with two wheels, it’s probably a Harley.

Victoria proudly claims itself to be the starting point of the Trans-Canada Highway, news of course to everybody in Newfoundland. What they don’t say is the road peters out after 10 miles because they’re on an island. In Fort McMurray, Highway 63 is a road all the way; not a good road, but you don’t need to take a ferry to get here.

Miniature World in Victoria advertises it has the world’s largest dollhouses. In other oxymoronic news, tree-hugging vegans, aging yuppies all, protested for social justice in all their arrogant humility.

In Fort McMurray we don’t have any time for that. We call a spade a shovel and we use it to dig.

Fort McMurray has over a hundred different nationalities yet is squarely Canadian and proudly so. People from Victoria are so not Canadian they even live below the historic dividing line between Canada and the USA.

In 1855 the B.C. gold rush increased Victoria’s population six-fold within a few days. The same thing happens to Fort McMurray every second Sunday afternoon on 63 North.

Victoria has a bug zoo, where they keep insects in artificial climates and conditions for the gratification of a goggle-eyed uncaring public. PETA has so far not protested this unethical treatment of these creatures, and their silence while focusing on more photogenic animals, like seals, smells distinctly like bigotry.

In Fort McMurray we don’t practice animal apartheid, and our insects are allowed to roam free.

So who wins? Victoria may have better scenery and restaurants, but they also have hypocritical pensioner hippies, animal lovers who only love cuddly cute animals. Sorry Victoria if we make you cross, but you ain’t real. For that you need to come to YMM.