Blues and twos

The police is running a contest to design Fredericton’s Next Police Car. Right now it looks like

PoliceCanada.ca

The public image of a police department isn’t usually part of urban planning discourse, but I think it’s actually one of the most visible contributions cities make to the community fabric. Quick – name the first municipal service that comes to mind. For most people, it’s the city’s police department.

Out on the street, police cars are probably the most-often seen tangible product of municipal taxation, other than traffic lights or street signs. As such, they’re also the service that lends best to branding with the City’s identity. (Of course the streets themselves are City products – but you can’t really put logos or colours right on them.)

Unfortunately, there’s only one city I’ve seen that actually does this well: Ottawa manages to coordinate its police, fire, ambulance and even parking authority with the signature O-swoosh logo and consistent fonts on street signs and such

But I digress – back to police cars… On film and on TV, producers go to great lengths to match prop police cars and such with the look of the real thing. Though Toronto’s CN Tower or Montréal’s Place-Ville-Marie might show up in a scene trying to pass for New York or Los Angeles, a passing white-and-blue NYPD or black-and-white LAPD cruiser is enough to suspend reality and keep the plot on track.

Of course there’s no pretense of Fredericton’s police vehicles making it on the big screen anytime soon, but every time a car runs a patrol or attends a scene, it’s not just ferrying constables across town – it’s establishing a presence, asserting authority, making society’s values and laws tangible. And when bad things happen, it’s extending the community’s concern, keeping a promise To Serve and Protect.

I remember biking by a crime scene in Vancouver. Some store got robbed, and it looked like the bad guys beat a few people on the way out. The police must’ve just arrived, because constables were rushing in, escorting injured people to ambulances, blocking off traffic with their cars and sealing off the area.

The Vancouver Police recently re-did their cars, and I guess some of those freshly-done cruisers were on the scene: a thick blue waving ribbon – I think it was a Aboriginal stylised animal head – ran down the side like racing stripes; a jaunty half-maple leaf peeked towards the tail; and the door was open, announcing the “Vancouver LICE” were on the scene – they made the word “POLICE” too big to fit.

You could tell the officers were definitely doing their jobs professionally and taking the time to help everyone that was hurt; but with the sirens wailing and people still yelling and crying in shock, the gaudy, happy ribbons and racing stripes really looked odd. Almost trivialising, insensitive in such a terrible situation.

I don’t know what goes into police car marking design, but some of them don’t look like police cars at all! All the fancy racing stripes and swoopy swooshes look like any other commercial truck or car trying to catch attention and sell itself. Even the word “Police” is dolled-up with bubble letters, multicolours and drop-shadows. There’s a new pattern up the highway in Miramichi

PoliceCanada.ca

I guess it looks festive and happy and friendly, but if there was an emergency and you needed to wave a passing cop over, you wouldn’t recognise that as a police car. It just doesn’t scream “Police” when you look at it – a big white Impala or Crown Vic with multicolour stripes is mostly likely a taxi, trying to catch your attention and make fares. You’d have to actually read “Police” on the door, see the constable in the driver’s seat or the flashing lights and sirens to tell what it really is.

And most of all – when you need the police to come over, you don’t go looking for festive or happy or friendly. You need something authoritative, solid and trustworthy – something that says professionals are on the scene, things are under control, and everything is going to be ok. Nike swooshes and Photoshopped gradients when people are in distress – at best, it’s just a little awkward, no?

Anyway, threw together something mock-ups: nothing fancy, but I think they’re cleanly and instantly “Police”, there’s no mistaking them for a taxi or a courier service; the blue-and-red are already recognised police colours, and the black-and-white is pretty obvious; there’s the City logo; with the doors open it won’t say “ICE” or “LICE”; and if it shows up in a newspaper photo of a crime scene or carrying Fredericton’s Most Wanted, it’s not looking trivialising or insensitive

I also re-drew the badge – current on the left, edits in the middle and right. The middle one switches the leaves for a standard radiating shield, police tradition since the first modern force, London’s Metropolitan Police Service; on the right, trying to match the official Canadian Heraldic Authority style

Also re-did the City’s coat of arms – the existing triple-shield-within-a-shield coat of arms seems a bit wonky

According to Terrence C Manuel KStJ CD FHSC (don’t know who that is, but lots of letters after the name, so he must be an expert), “the arms for the city were designed by Dr James Robb, a professor at King’s College (now University of New Brunswick), who was also a member of Fredericton’s City Council. The arms were drawn without regard to the laws of heraldry and were not recorded nor approved by the College of Arms in Britain”. Instead I wonder if simply dividing a shield in four would work, like

Anyway, we’ll find out soon how that contest turns out.

Spring – when a young man’s fancy turns to…

Growing up in Regina – the only major city in the country that’s not on a coastline or riverbank – you miss out on the Canadian springtime ritual: flooding. All that winter snow has to go somewhere, right? (Vancouver and Victoria don’t count – you just get the once-a-century tsunami instead. It balances out, I guess.) In Fredericton, it’s business as usual.

Of course since the city’s been around for over 250 years they’ve managed to come up with a reasonable solution: don’t build anything important within 6,5m of the bank. But when the sky is clear and the temperature’s a balmy 20-degrees and your fancy turns to a long-awaited run or ride along the river valley, you do kind of wish they could come up with a way to keep the trails open.

It’s not just the water that puts the trails out of commission, at least for a little while – you also get a flotsam (or is it jetsam?) (Edit: I guess it’s neither) bunch of junk that washes up and gets in the way. Driftwood and such – at least, nothing in the news of anything more “exciting” ever washing up on the banks of the Saint John. That is a good thing.

These two obviously have their springtime in Fredericton down pat:

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Washed out trails didn’t stop the first Critical Mass of the year starting up though.

I always wanted to check one of these out. Basically, you get a bunch of people on bikes together, and you go around on the street. You don’t really go anywhere in particular – that’s part of how it’s supposed to work, no organisation, no set route – it’s just to be on the road, safety in numbers together, alongside cars and trucks and such, asserting the common privilege (not a right, of course) of operating a vehicle, motorised or otherwise.

The clichéd confrontation – angry driver: “You’re blocking traffic!” Angry cyclist: “I am traffic!” I don’t know if that actually happens. When I was in Victoria and Vancouver I never saw any Critical Mass events; I guess since biking is already a part of everyday life and traffic there there’s no need to state the obvious. The same way how the rest of the world wouldn’t need them either – you’d never hear of cyclists needing to assert their existence in, say, Amsterdam, or Beijing.

According to Wikipedia, sometimes there are conflicts involving Critical Mass – apparently enough to warrant an entire article, “Conflicts involving Critical Mass”. Like all conflicts generally, this happens when people become immature and decide to flout the law – drivers fail to yield or drive unsafely around the bikes, or cyclists ignore the rules of the road and actively obstruct traffic.

I wasn’t sure how Fredericton Critical Mass usually behaves, so I wanted to hang back and see what everyone else does before actually joining in. If it was just going to be some kind of perverse “revenge” against drivers and an excuse to piss them off, count me out. Everyone looked pretty nice though; and, the majority of people had helmets too, so they seemed like a reasonable bunch.

It was supposed to start up at around 5.30 or so, but when 5.45 came around and I was getting restless and hungry, I went for dinner instead and just lazed around the park. Enjoy it while it lasts – who knows, by this time tomorrow it’ll be flooded over.

Québec City to Fredericton

Day 12: Québec City to Fredericton

Well, I wasn’t able to sleep after all. But staying up for a late-night look at the fortifications was worth it

You really could just stroll around and take pictures all day in a place like Québec. To mix medical and military metaphors, it’s such a high-yield target-rich environment. When you’ve got a camera, it’s impossible to resist

All levels of government pulled out the stops for the 400th anniversary of Québec – municipal, provincial and, kind of controversially, federal too. Controversial not because there’s any doubt about the importance of Québec to Canadian culture and heritage, but there really are people who say Ottawa should mind its’ business and let Québecoises and Québecois programme their own celebration. (Probably the same people who also think Paul McCartney’s free concert at the Plains of Abraham is like reliving the English “conquest” over the French and wanted it shut down.) So I wasn’t too surprised seeing this defaced Heritage Canada sign

If anything, I’m impressed whoever did it used red paint (instead of the usual Québec blue), which actually “erases” the Canada wordmark quite effectively, and settled for a clean, simple “X” instead of spray painting the usual obscene anti-Canadian hysterics and vitriol. It’s as classy and “respectful” (for lack of a better word) example of graffiti I’ve ever seen, to be honest. I’m surprised they didn’t “X” over the English text specifically, but maybe they were in a hurry.

Back on the road – no rush, it’s only a few hours on to Fredericton. It’s a chance to appreciate the subtleties of the Québec highway signs. Even though they’re all in outdated Series E face, the symbols are better-executed than, well, the rest of North America. Back in Montréal, the first thing you see

So simple: the “no right turn” symbol, and a red light, and “Île de Montréal” to tell you it’s the rule on the whole island. Clean and easy. No big messy panels that have to spell out “NO RIGHT TURN ON RED LIGHT” (or whatever the French equivalent would be – maybe “VIRAGE À DROITE INTERDIT SUR FEU ROUGE” or something). It would’ve been even more elegant if they just had a graphic to indicate Montréal, but since the metropolitan de-merger I guess they can’t just use the city logo.

On the panel signs, numbers are easy to read on the colour-coded shields, and instead of spelling out “EXIT” or “SORTIE”, there’s a branching symbol with a corresponding junction number – way clearer

And more of a cosmetic detail, curves in the road are marked with white-on-red chevrons instead of the usual white-on-yellow

English returns to the highway when you cross into officially-bilingual New Brunswick – I guess I’m home!

The highway signs aren’t as nicely done as Québec, but they’re pretty clear here too: no need for “EXIT / SORTIE”, the numbered tabs get the point across; junctions are marked not only with the connecting routes, but also the ones they extend to further down (here, the (2), leading to the (7); and the overhead arrows actually line up with the lanes below!

Coming from the Imperial glory of Old Québec, New Brunswick is so bucolic, pastoral – the registration plates used to say “Picture Province” on them, it’s postcard-pretty

though there must be something eating away at the trees around here

The Delta Fredericton – feels like I was just here, I think the staff are starting to recognise me. It’s going to be home for the new few days ’til my apartment’s ready and my stuff arrives from Victoria. Better get comfortable

Table and floor lamps abound – I wouldn’t expect any less. In fact I think my eyes might be getting used to it, dimming as soon as I’m in the room, expecting the overkill illumination. Better add lamps to my shopping list when I finally get to my apartment – whenever that will be.

Ottawa to Québec City

Day 12: Ottawa to Québec City

Ottawa to Québec City via Montréal. I lived in Montréal for four years but never once drove in it, so I have no idea what to expect. All I remember is that, along with New York City, it’s the only place in North America that bans right turns on red lights, because drivers were killing pedestrians all the time. And, highway overpasses tend to collapse in the area nowadays, because of the growing heavy traffic overloading the 50s-60s era design capacity and loads. Plus the signs will be in French.

The first overpass…

Phew.

And ahead – a double-overpass. Double-danger…

Phew, phew.

Actually, like Calgary was it’s a pleasant surprise driving on the Montréal autoroutes. Maybe I just lucked out on the timing getting in. As long as you keep up your speed and can keep traffic moving in tight packed spaces, you’re fine. Other drivers seemed to recognise the out-of-province plates and give a little – little – chance to squeeze in and join the lane. Again, as long as you’re keeping it moving, c’est parfait!

Circulation fluide – smooth sailing, easy-peasy.

The welcome sign sets the mood – fêtons nos 400 ans, Happy Birthday Québec! The rain might’ve thinned the crowds but it couldn’t dampen the charm

Definitely the best way to take the place in is just to walk around, soak up all that UNESCO World Heritage Site ambience.

Where most cities put their dumpsters and throw their garbage, Québecers put sculptures and art – only at a leisurely walking speed do you pick up on these little details that make this place so special

Though if you look hard enough, there are bus shelters camouflaged amidst the fortifications – OC Transpo red definitely wouldn’t fly around here

but if you can manage the steep hills, bikes are best for the narrow streets – wish I had mine along

Not that buses can’t get around 16th-century carriage width streets though – Québec has its own fleet of minibuses just for that. You can see they’re not much longer than a regular minivan or Toyota Camry. How cute! And better still, they’re free! And even better, they’re eco-friendly and electric-powered!

But if you have to have a car, I think these European streets are where my Rabbit feels at home

And of course, checking in at the Delta Québec – throwing hotel standards to the wind, distinct society that it is: no bedside table lamps at all!

I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Those wall-mount lamps are just off the wall, I’m totally thrown off!

Ottawa

Well, I didn’t make it out to the hospital. It’s ok – I still have pictures from earlier in the year

and knowing how hospitals change with time (ie get overcrowded and dirty and worse), it’s probably best to remember it as the squeaky-clean contagion-preventing newest-in-the-country Critical Care ward it was when I was rotating through two months ago. My ProxCard probably wouldn’t let me in anymore anyway. And come to think of it, since I always bussed it to work, I don’t even know how to get there by car either. It really was quite a sight to behold though, if you’re used to working in hospitals in under-funded health systems. (Yes, Alberta hospitals still rule the roost.)

Glass sliding doors and anterooms at every bed – you can doctor and nurse without passing contagious diseases from patient to patient now! And computers at every station mean you can actually follow-up on all those tests you order by rote. (Yep, there’s that Saskatchewan landscape on the desktop – maybe that’s part of why being on the ward always felt like home…)

Every ward bed has natural light – it’s been proven to help cut down on Critical Care delirium, when patients have natural light to keep their day-night cycles normal; older wards with no windows always led to prolonged admissions just because of that. Of course, making every bed face the outside just to have a window would mean obscenely-long hallways – not good when you’ve got unstable patients rolling in from the OR or Emerg – so there’s a skylighted “alley” terrace to let light into the “inner” ward

Just step down the hallway and you’ll see how quickly hospitals show their age – this section is about as old as me

It’s broken up into “modules” – blocks within the hospital megastructure, divided by a grid of hallways. Depending on which way you enter and which way you turn, the blocks may or may not come to you in any particular logical order, so they tried to make coloured trails to help you figure out where to go – not exactly the most elegant system, and not so helpful if you’re colour blind either

One reason to have gone back though – I used to pass by this door all the time

“Clinical Decision Unit”. I have no idea what that is, and I was meaning to take a peek beyond that door but never got around to it. I’m picturing some sort of inner sanctum – a Fortress of Solitude amidst the chaos of the Emergency Room, where staff got away from the din and mess, conferred with their colleagues over a dignified cup of coffee, comfortably reclined in leather club seats, a library of medical reference tomes at their fingertips, with busts of famed doctors physic presiding over the ceremony. Dilemmas would be discussed and options hashed out – admit/transfer/turf, medicate/operate/show-the-gate, live/die, etc – and staff, re-armed and re-moralised thus, would exit thence again into the fray, Clinical Decision in hand. And all is well in the world.

Whatever it is, I know that none of the other hospitals I work at have “Clinical Decision Unit”s… I guess it’s just laissez-faire medicine outside of Ottawa General; the rest of us don’t make decisions at all, we just hem-and-haw and let things happen.

Could’ve also gone and checked to see if they ever update this sign

I did, however, make it out to Westboro – if I ever have the chance to live in Ottawa, this would be my ‘hood

I always loved the pattern on the MEC store – it’s just corrugated aluminium sheets, the same thing you use for roofs on shacks and outhouses, but it’s such a neat and clean and simple solution to an otherwise blank wall

Though if you have the skill, resources, and some worthy subject matter, a proper mural can’t be beat – I can’t believe I never noticed this Ottawa Fire Department one before, I must’ve passed it a hundred times. Then again, I’ve never had to enter a parking lot in Ottawa ’til this visit

You really do miss out on so much when you have to drive around – at least, in a city where walking, biking or bussing is a feasible option, and you really don’t need a car to do anything or get anywhere. Eg, driving down Wellington St you end up in tunnel vision, and you’d have no idea the nation’s centre of government and democracy is just a few metres to your left

It really didn’t feel right at all, so I parked the car back at the hotel and got a bus day pass instead. Back on the Big Red Limousine, and the Big Red bus shelters to match – not the prettiest, or the easiest to keep clean, but they’re unmistakable OC Transpo

A nod to official bilingualism – all OC Transpo signs have to appear in both English and French. I’m just not sure which one is which is which here: “Lebreton” vs “LeBreton”. There’s also a third station sign there, to show this is the station for the War Museum.

I just missed the opening for the Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race exhibit last time I was here, but I definitely wasn’t going to miss it this time. It’s about the role of doctors and medicine in Nazi Germany and supporting racial policy: starting with the measurement and recording of things like head size and skin shades and eye colour (to first classify the races), then to marriage and child-bearing restriction (to prevent mixing and preserve purity), then to forced sterilisation (to stop the passing on of unfit traits), and finally euthanasia and outright murder (to remove inferior races entirely).

It’s a touring exhibit from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, so under copyright they don’t let you take pictures in the gallery. On the one hand, that kind of goes against the social interest in learning about such history, and passing on the message to others; but then again, it’s set up not by a regular museum, but a memorial museum, so there’s an extra dimension of ceremony and dignity in visiting the exhibit. Plus you’re struck by the gravity of the displays and objects, you’d probably have a problem taking a photo anyway.

Horror – you feel it when you approach the artifacts: a set of calipers, the measuring notches counting out a patient’s race, and thence life or death; a genetics manual, illustrating the flowchart of the permitted and forbidden lineages; an escape-proof asylum door, chipped from the inside with scratch marks and fist-sized dents; a beige, steel crib, used to hold babies for gassing; surgical instruments for medical experimentation; an order on Adolf Hitler’s personal letterhead to proceed with the programme.

All layed out in order from the start to finish – once you get over the horror of it, you realise: there’s really a logic to it all, method to the madness. If you’ve come in with a science or medical background, it really, chillingly, cruelly, makes sense. One leads to the next; one cannot happen without that before it. It’s argued that people didn’t see things coming, that it was impossible to know how far things out would go. But when you see it in hindsight, it’s hard to believe anyone – especially physicians and medical staff – couldn’t see the progression of things and where they were going.

And – I guess this is my trying to make a positive spin – you see there are so many places that people in medicine could’ve organised themselves, stopped the programme and prevented it all. Which is why it’s so important for people, especially people who claim they see “the big picture”, to get involved in things like research and government programmes and the military, especially when they disagree with it. Sometimes people on campus protest against government and the military recruiting at universities for people into research, which makes no sense at all; programmes you disagree with aren’t going to just shut down because you “boycott” and keep away from them. You need to be in the system to do anything about what’s going on. Silly. [rant off]

Being a travelling exhibit, it’s Canadianised with official French translations, and references to local history and politicians and policy on top of the original American-written content. I think this is actually the most important part of the gallery: it’s easy to blame everything on the Nazis and Hitler, but these same ideas grow close to home too. There’s references to sterilisation programmes in various Canadian provinces in the early 1900s, plus Saskatchewan Premier and founder of Medicare (and official Greatest Canadian) Tommy Douglas‘ master’s thesis, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family” promoting sterilisation for the mentally and physically handicapped – coming out of a province with agricultural roots, the concept of separating healthy stock from the weak, and eliminating cross-fertilising isn’t unreasonable. You realise how easily and how quickly a twist of logic, and a willing people, can make the leap from something seemingly benign to something so destructive – which is why remembering this can happen here, too, is so important.

I know that doesn’t do the exhibit justice – it’s running until 11 Nov, so definitely go and see it.

There’s also a related exhibit at the National Gallery: The 1930s: The Making of “The New Man”. I actually did make it out to the opening of this one a few weeks ago when I was here. I’m even less qualified to say anything about art than Deadly Medicine, but luckily they had this French guy, a curator from the Louvre, come in and give the tour

Both Deadly Medicine and 1930 open with the same piece: a glass anatomical structure of a man, illustrating the various vessels and networks making up the body. The logical, technical advanced through the decade crossed over into both eugenics theory and art; the “Fascism” section of the exhibit shows how one was used to idealise and support the other, and vice-versa. The obvious pick: Leni Riefenstahl’s classic, genre-defining propaganda film, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will)

Another Hitler touch, this actually hung in one of his personal residences in Munich: Reich Chamber for Visual Arts president (and Reich commissioner against degenerate art) Adolf Ziegler’s Die vier Elemente (The Four Elements)

The Louvre curator explained Ziegler’s intent (though this quote is from the Wikipedia article since I didn’t take notes)

His static, pseudo-classical nudes depicted ideal Aryan figures. In an interview with American playwright Barrie Stavis, Ziegler explained that a painting of a beautiful nude German woman encourages the ideal of a perfect body and gives German men the incentive to have many German children.

The real art connoisseurs in the crowd (ie, everyone except Philistine me) took notes and hung on his every word – pronounced in proper, classy France French, of course.

Before I left Ottawa I wanted to get a picture in front of the National Defence Headquarters sign. Being the national capital Ottawa’s the only place where government building signs don’t say “Federal Building” or “Revenue Building” – here, the structures aren’t mere branches or processing centres. No, here, the edifice is the ministry, the be-all and end-all, where respective departmental bucks stop. “Justice”, “Revenue”, and of course, “National Defence”

Our Pentagon isn’t much to look at, just your average concrete office building, but it’s right Downtown, on a nice setting by the Rideau Canal and Confederation Park

and it’s got easy access to transit – it shares an OC Transpo station with the Rideau Centre mall right across the street

Inside, it looks like the 60s-70s prefab concrete you see on the outside lined with terra-cotta flooring to accentuate the heel-clicking

with an array of medals and awards to inspire the staff who work here (and so you can decode each others ribbons too)

I don’t know if they award this one any more: “For Efficient Service”

They have a well-stocked library, with military magazines and defence reviews from around the world

plus some neat historical finds

It’s declassified now, so I can show you without having to kill you!

I tried to find an equivalent uniform recognition manual for the Taliban, but I think they’re still working on it.