Downtown last week I spotted a desperately thin, long-haired beggar making his slow but sure way towards me. At each person he passed, he held out his hands in supplication, whispering a request for spare change. When he got to me, I barely had time to tell him I had no change before he spat out: 'You have money, you son-of-a-bitch.'
Why me? And then again, I suppose, why not? How much rejection can any one person take? I was, apparently, one too many.
Summer in the capital always brings out the beggars and hustlers. When the weather turns, their ranks will thin considerably, most hitchhiking west for a winter in the mild but wet climes of Vancouver.
But, for the moment, they are on every street corner in the downtown core. Each has his or her own pitch. There are the ones with dogs. You may not feel any sympathy for an apparently healthy young man in a country with free medical care and other social-support systems. But you might take pity on his pet.
Others, I have recently noted, are offering dog-eared paperbacks that they have evidently scrounged from rubbish bins. Take a book, leave a bit of change.
The most striking beggar, a man who has become an annual fixture on one busy downtown corner, sports a red-and-white top hat adorned with a bright, red maple leaf. A Canadian nationalist, he's cheerful and appears to be successful at his trade.