BCBusiness

44 BCBusiness dECEMBER/JAnuARy 2018 By chance, two Vancouver Police Department o"cers in plain clothes have just pulled up, and they jump out of their car with guns drawn. The shooter turns his re on them and backs away, handgun out, white plastic bag still •apping around his wrist. As he moves around the corner, a bul- let shatters the glass of a condo tower lobby. The gunman hops onto a bike and takes o– down the seawall. Meanwhile, a passing doctor desperately tries to stop the bleeding. The victim is loaded into an ambulance, leaving most of his blood on the sidewalk. "But the ambulance didn't move," local resident Adam Hunter later tells a TV reporter, "so I had a feeling he wasn't doing that good." It was among the most dramatic shootouts ever seen on the streets of Vancouver. And poor Paul Dragan missed it all. "I have no memory of any of it," he says. Three years later, the owner of three Reckless Bike Stores looks remarkably healthy—trim, ath- letic, younger than his 55 years. A little greyer, per- haps, but that tends to happen even when one is not shot in the chest by a former employee. A shirt- less photo would show extensive surgical scars, and an X-ray a pair of lungs that no longer match. But Dragan does not have the appearance of a man whose survival once faced the kind of odds associ- ated with a $25 ticket on the PNE Prize Home. His shooting may be an extreme case, but it's not unprecedented. There are 350,000 cases of workplace violence across the country every year, Statistics Canada reports. "It exists on a contin- uum, from incivility to disrespect to bullying and harassment to physical violence," says Vancouver- based workplace psychologist Jennifer Newman. Small businesses without human resources departments may be most vulnerable, espe- cially given recent labour short- ages. Even a casual employee hired for temporary work is still a staff member. "Hiring is not something to be tri•ed with," says Heather MacKenzie, founder and senior partner of the Integrity Group, a Vancou- ver consulting rm that helps organizations prevent and resolve workplace harassment, discrimination and physical violence. "Employers have to pay attention to every danger sign, from inappropriate com- ments to uncivil behaviour." WorkSafeBC logged 1,954 violent incidents in this prov- ince in 2015, a 17 per cent increase over the previ- ous year. Between 2006 and 2015, 11 people died as a result of workplace violence, eight of them from gunshots. That Paul Dragan failed to make that list is a story as improbable as any fantasy tale of re- breathing monsters. o n a sunny fall day in 2017, Reckless on Davie is hopping. A little truck pulls up with a load of wonky bicycles, sent over from a local hotel for repairs. Tourists returning rentals cluster at the podium out front. A shirtless and unshaven man wheels up on a battered bike and asks to use some tools. Dragan obliges, and the man sets about tightening screws. "We don't like to set a precedent for doing free repairs, but it's a good policy to help people out," Dragan says. That same corporate philosophy had once been applied to an occasional Reckless employee named Gerald Battersby. Dragan had placed a help-wanted ad for a part-time position assembling bikes. Battersby answered. "He had some bike store experience," Dragan recalls. "A little cuckoo. But that's what you get in a bike store. Over the years you get used to that." Dragan has been in the bike business a long time, especially if you include the two-and-a-half years he spent competing on the European racing circuit in the early 1980s. "Too many drugs," he says now. "All those problems you saw surround- ing Lance Armstrong, that's not recent. That's been going on for 100 years." Born in Montreal and raised in Nova Scotia, "Hiring is not something to be trifled with. Employers have to pay attention to every danger sign, from inappropriate comments to uncivil behaviour" — Heather MacKenzie, founder, The Integrity Group it is tuesday morning, June 10, 2014. at the False Creek end of Vancouver's Davie Street, grocery shoppers come and go at Urban Fare, and a woman pushes a baby carriage up the street toward Pacific boulevard. a thick-set man with a grey beard, wearing a bike helmet and a large yellow backpack, comes around the corner from Marinaside Crescent onto the east side of Davie. he is carrying some- thing inside a white plastic bag. Moments later, pedestrians recoil from the explosive concussion of a large-calibre gunshot. a man drops to the sidewalk in front of Starbucks, bleeding out from a massive chest wound.

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