More ignorant judgment, served on a plate
California plates aside, Candice Csaky is Victorian to the core. She’s third generation, born in Royal Jubilee, just like her mother and just like Csaky’s own 12- and 16-year-old children. The Vic High grad has spent most of her life in the capital, and has owned homes here since 2002.
Not that any of that made a difference to the grandmother-aged woman on the bicycle who began flashing the finger and yelling at Csaky and her 12-year-old daughter Lacey while they were stopped at a red light in Oak Bay on Sunday. Those California plates — in Campus Honda plate holders, no less — were all she saw.
The woman wanted Csaky and her daughter to go back where they came from. They were responsible for spreading the coronavirus, she hollered. Csaky tried to explain herself, but the woman wouldn’t listen. “She just kept yelling and swearing.”
How many times do we have to hear stories like this? How many tales of selfrighteous people leaping to judgment of those whose background they don’t know?
Csaky’s background goes like this: She and her family moved to California in 2014 when her husband took a job in Silicon Valley. They returned to Victoria in 2017 in part because they had promised their son that he could go to high school back home. But then they went back to California after that son Noah, a promising hockey goalie, was offered a spot at the Lake Tahoe Prep Academy; it played into the decision that Csaky’s husband was still shuttling back and forth to his Silicon Valley tech job.
But then it was time to return to Victoria. Csaky moved back on March 9 to start a government job. The plan was for the rest of the family to follow at the end of the school year.
That timetable was suddenly accelerated a week later when the pandemic erupted. Fearing they would be trapped by California’s new shelter-in-place order, and heeding Justin Trudeau’s call for Canadians to come home, Csaky’s husband and kids took half an hour to pack up, then bolted for B.C.
Imagine that — no time to say farewell to friends, just a panicked trip home to Victoria, followed by two weeks quarantining in a motel room with two dogs and a cat. “My husband slept on the floor,” Csaky said. “It was the only room they could get.” Cooped up, the kids tried to do their schoolwork online.
Once the three passed their quarantine, Csaky joined them. “We were essentially, as one friend called us, COVID refugees.” It wasn’t until May that they moved into the basement suite of their Victoria home, having found new accommodation for the tenants who had been living there.
Oh, and did Csaky mention the other stressors? Her husband has Type 1 diabetes. “I personally have a rare lung condition that required removing part of my lungs a few years ago,” she wrote.
“I’m currently in remission, but I also have a rare kidney disease, which also puts me at risk.”
OK, but why is Csaky still driving around with those California plates? In part, it’s because the multi-step process of repatriating their Victoria-bought car back to B.C. isn’t as straightforward as you might expect. They hope to have B.C. plates in a couple of weeks.
As for those other U.S.registered cars you occasionally spot? Csaky figures there’s a good chance they’re driven by expats. “People need to realize it’s not that easy to cross the wborder if you’re not Canadian.”
And even returning expats aren’t driving until they emerge from a quarantine that is monitored, and adhered to, more firmly than people think. (Csaky found herself dropping groceries outside her husband’s motel room, then texting him to let him know they were there.)
Csaky tried to explain all this to the woman on the bike, to no avail. “She didn’t care. She just kept throwing the finger and yelling.”
The woman didn’t seem to care that she was hurling her invective at a 12-year-old girl. Just another example of outrage culture blighting what is supposed to be a fair-minded country.
The irony is that during her time in California, Csaky became more and more proud — “probably to the point of being a little obnoxious” — of what it means to be Canadian. “Canadians have this reputation of being kind, being nice, being friendly.”
That’s not what she saw Sunday, though. “This is not Canadian. This is terrible.”