When I recieved this brochure for a tourist attraction at Stave Lake, BC, with my power bill, I did the usual thing with it, which was to ignore it. When I looked at it again, something bothered me that I couldn’t put my finger on.
And then it hit me. There it was on the map of BC’s lower mainland. Actually, there it wasn’t, because the thing that I couldn’t put my finger on was the City of Richmond, which was completely absent from the map.
To clarify, I don’t mean that the map omits a little dot or a label or something. Richmond is located on a very large island at the mouth of the Fraser River (it’s named Lulu Island for some reason, but nobody calls it that, because of the embarrassment it causes). It’s really hard to miss, especially if you’ve ever tried to travel south from Vancouver. On BC Hydro’s map, however, there’s only a big, blue empty space south of Vancouver.
This made me wonder… is there some plan afoot to remove Richmond? Has Premier Gordon Campbell in a fit of public-private-partnership madness sold Richmond to a private developer, who will tow it to a more exotic location?
The other alternative is that Richmond is simply a figment of my imagination, and I didn’t actually spend a large part of my childhood living there. No, Richmond has a website. None of my other figments have websites, unless I’ve imagined all of you. Hmm.
Anyway, I want answers from BC Hydro. Why is a city of 165,000 people missing? Who drew that map, who paid for it, and what’s their agenda?
I’m betting that it’s the same people who misplaced Prince Edward Island in the Fodor’s travel guide.