This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Cars and Wasaga have always been linked. A sandy beach only an hour north of Toronto (the centre of the universe) is easily within reach in a car. Back in the 1940s, soldiers stationed at Base Borden visited Wasaga Beach while on leave, and helped spread news of the resort-like location. In the 1950s, families would load up into their Chrysler Town & Country station wagons and drive up from the city for a day at the beach.
In the 1960s, cars would line the beach, parking along the shore line. The main street looked like a car show as motorists cruised the strip, looking for a place to park, or just looking to be seen. Sadly, parking on the beach was prohibited after 1973 but that just didn’t end the link between Wasaga and the automobile.
As a younger man in the 1990s, I would head up to Wasaga in my double-double coffee coloured car with a house speaker wired up in the trunk. The car wasn’t much to look at, but I’d drop the back seats, and blast the bass out the windows. Good times! But lately, all the stories of Wasaga beach are negative. News stations bombard a petrified public with images of ‘youth gone wild’ doing burnouts, donuts and street racing at the beach. This weekend was nothing new, with so many motorists showing up for the H20i car crawl at Wasaga, that police were completely overwhelmed. Late in the day, things got ugly, and the crowd turned on the cops, damaging police cruisers.
I don’t know what to think anymore. Take a look at any of the news stories out of Wasaga this weekend, and it’s all bad. CityTV and CBC interviewing a local ‘Karen‘ who thinks the community should be closed to non-residents. That will surely bring in the tourist dollars! How horrible that just because people live at Wasaga, they think they can keep it all to themselves.
But then you watch a video from the H20i car rally of teens jumping on police cars after the cops tried to shutdown the ‘sideshow‘ of burnouts. These car enthusiasts aren’t helping the Wasaga community to welcome them with the chaos they bring.
~ by Chris #16 Demaras ~
Police in Canada is too soft!!! I have seen the cops dealing with soccer hooligans in Brazil, they have huge wooden cubs and they know how to use them. That kid jumping on the cruiser’s hood would have gotten at least one broken leg.