Canada: We Have Morons Too

Brendan McAleer
by Brendan McAleer

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!

Brendan McAleer
Brendan McAleer

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  • Tparkit Tparkit on Apr 19, 2012

    They found him. He is a complete azzhat: http://www.calgaryherald.com/Video+police+seize+motorbike+driven/6487619/story.html (All of which reminds me, it's time to get the Ninja out...)

  • Charliej Charliej on Apr 20, 2012

    I have a friend who had a son. The son loved motorcycles. He was involved in a collision with an SUV that ran a stop sign. Major injuries, but not debilitating. SUV drivers insurance paid a bunch of money. Kid bought a used Porsche 911. I only saw it one time, sitting in the garage with a bashed in nose. Kid got it fixed. Posted video on Facebook showing speedometer climbing well over 100. Coming home at 4:30 AM, kid missed curve. Hit tree, died at the scene. I call him a kid, he was 30 years old. His mother is shattered. I don't think she will ever recover. Both wrecks, I won't call them accidents, happened within 2 blocks of his home. I love motorcycles, too. I love to accelerate from a stop to past a hundred, but I don't anymore. Your decisions come back on others. When I lived in Alabama, I could go to a track day and enjoy the riding without endangering anyone else. There is no place to do that down here in Mexico. When you are tempted to do something stupid on the road, think about my friends wife. Dieing is not bad. Leaving grieving parents and siblings is very bad.

    • Brett Woods Brett Woods on Apr 20, 2012

      Canadian B.C. women are well known to be hard asses. Still, I'm surprised to find out that a middle aged mother is the Canadian Ghost rider. Seems like she could have taken that last bend faster but lifted like that kid who crashed his 911. You can see she was being conservative after that spirited lane splitting. When the break in period is over you have to air out those litre bikes but that was reckless. I don't know which is worse, speeding or texting?

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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