Years ago on a stint as a construction worker in rural Alberta, I met a peculiar coworker. We’ll call him Travis. Travis, like most of the men on that work crew, was from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.
One day I found myself alone in a truck with Travis, and chided him about the Stanley Cup riots that had struck Vancouver three years before in 2011. Travis’s city, I said, had embarrassed our whole country that night.
“Not to mention,” I went on, “the people who did it tried covering their faces on their way home on the Skytrain to avoid being tagged by the cameras.”