In fairness, it has to be noted that this exact improvisational quality is also a real source of vulnerability. What’s fresh about this place, a kind of cultural and economic tabula rasa, has provided for some highly unstable outcomes. It’s noteworthy that on only two occasions has the city found itself on the brink of a sports championship: Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs in both cases, in 1994 against the New York Rangers and in 2011 against the Boston Bruins. Both times, on losing, Vancouver descended into manic violence with stores looted and cars burned. There’s a troublingly adolescent quality to these disturbances, which I theorize are less likely to occur in cities that are soberly aware of their own capacity for self-harm. In Vancouver — where cyclists wear helmets and nobody carries a concealed weapon — I’ve often wondered if in our youthfulness we also lack the maturity to see our own hypocrisies. A city smugly in the downward facing dog.

As if to illustrate this point, when asked about working with an authoritarian regime on returning from a trip to China, our mayor managed only this glib reply: “You can question how worthwhile democracy is in a lot of countries right now.”

I don’t know what he meant. Maybe the suggestion is that only with the reach and power of the government that threatened to execute his girlfriend’s mother could a politician fix the dire problems of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which has the lowest per capita income in North America, where an estimated half of the resident population is thought to be drug users, where homelessness and addiction can be seen on every corner, in every alley.

Or perhaps what’s being alluded to is that more political authority is required to solve Vancouver’s other vexing problem: that real estate is inflating far past the ability of typical local incomes to support ownership, that we are pricing out our artists and our young people. Interesting, on this score, that a good part of the money flowing into our city and bubbling our real estate prices is coming from people trying to escape countries where leaders have exactly that kind of power. So maybe that would work.

But don’t bet on us trying. We choose freedom in this town, including all of its attendant complications. In the end, that will remain the beautiful problem that Vancouver will have, mayoral daydreaming notwithstanding. People will continue to come here and make up their stories as they go along. And if the sense of impermanence gets to us on occasion — which it will as we age, as we see ourselves ever more clearly, more soberly, more compassionately aware of all that we still do not do well — then we Vancouverites can take a moment to raise our eyes out of the city to those towering highlands, to the crisp lattice of snow. We’ll picture the cougars still prowling there, the swaying trees. We will see ourselves as if from a pebbly shore, a mirage trapped between what is above and below: a rolling, improvisatory work in progress.