Canada: We Have Morons Too

Some of you may be confused as this video seems to depict a warm sunny day, a dearth of moose (mooses? meese?), and the miscreant in question isn’t wreaking havoc with a snowmobile. But trust me, this is Canada, and this is one of our normally polite citizens tearing it up on a blue Yamaha R1 at extra-legal speeds on a crowded highway. He probably drank some bad maple syrup or something.

I know this piece of road well: it’s the 30km stretch between the provincial capital of British Columbia, Victoria, and the main ferry terminal to the mainland. It is, and I don’t think I exaggerate, one of the most highly patrolled pieces of roadway in Canada. The constabulary stack up their cruisers on a mid-point South-bound on-ramp and pick ’em off like shooting ptarmigan in a barrel. Once I even saw an RCMP officer in a tree (his horse looked a bit uncomfortable).

The footage shown is clearly extremely dangerous behaviour, roughly equivalent to firing a gun over the heads of a crowd of people. All it would take would be one swerve of a mini-van and the results at this speed would be beyond tragic. The best you could hope for would be that you were killed instantly so that you wouldn’t have to live with the burden of having injured or killed somebody.

But I lived in Victoria for the past two years and drove this road quite frequently, and I can’t quite put my hand on my heart and say that I always drove at or below the posted (and very slow-feeling) 80km/h speed-limit. What’s more, Victoria’s mild weather and relaxed lifestyle means that it is both a favourite of retirees and folks so laid-back they’d make Jeff Lebowski look like Donald Trump. That means left-lane camping like you would not believe. A Buick Century and an Astro-Van side-by-side at fifteen under the limit, giving new meaning to the term “drag race”. After fifteen miles of being stuck behind such a clot, I must confess to wishing I was on a litre-bike so that I could slip in between them and make the jump to plaid. Being a good Canadian I, of course, did no such thing.

So while I’m front-line for the public stoning, with a nice pointy rock already picked out, I have to ask myself, would this video have been okay at forty over? Thirty over? Ten over? All would be illegal in the eyes of the law: who am I to cast the first stone?

Oh hang on, I just remembered: he’s ruining it for the rest of us. TAKE THAT YOU HOSER!