olympics

You are currently browsing articles tagged olympics.

Mass protests and the future of convergence activism

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | 1 comment

By Jane Kirby
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

Is summit-hopping a dying tactic or the next Olympic sport?

Ever since tens of thousands of people converged on the streets of Seattle and successfully shut down the World Trade Organization in November 1999, convergences have been the tactic of choice for confronting global capitalism. It is no surprise, then, that those who see the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver as one more attempt by state and corporate elites to expand their own interests at the expense of the general population have called for a convergence from February 10 to 15, 2010.

Organizers have been working steadily towards the event for over two years, and have called for activists from across the country and around the world to descend on the Vancouver area to express their opposition to the social and environmental havoc wreaked by the Games. The convergence will consist of a two-day popular education conference followed by four days of action, focusing on the specific themes of indigenous peoples, land, poverty, women and the security crackdown on civil liberties. Countering the “corporate circus” of the Games with the spectacle of mass resistance, organizers hope to pack the streets with people engaging in diverse yet coordinated actions, disrupting the Games and sending a message of dissent to the world. But beyond this expression of dissent, what do activists actually hope to achieve with this tactic?

Organizers with the global justice movement have levelled substantial critiques of precisely this kind of mass protest, questioning both its effectiveness at achieving real change and its potential to distract or detract from more locally rooted organizing efforts. Those engaging in anti-Olympics resistance have had to grapple with difficult questions about the usefulness of convergences and consider whether the tactic can be modified to address both the concerns that have been raised and the specific circumstances of the event and the host community. Activists’ success or failure in dealing with these concerns in Vancouver will have significant implications for future organizing in the city, as well as the future of convergences as a tactic.

The rise and fall (and rise?) of convergences

Now emblematic of the heyday of the antiglobalization movement on the continent, Seattle saw the co-operation of labour groups, anarchists, NGOs, church groups and others in organizing a days-long gathering of resistance involving popular education, independent media training and an array of street actions ranging from marches to strikes to militant direct actions.

While mass demonstrations were nothing new, Seattle ushered in a new wave of mass protests in North America and beyond. Nearly every meeting of global political and financial elites over the past decade – the summits of the WTO, IMF, G8 and World Bank, in addition to numerous free trade agreements – has been met with resistance that organized itself according to the convergence model. For many, these convergences are celebrations of creative resistance and solidarity, direct threats to the state and corporate purveyors of global domination, and the primary voice of the antiglobalization movement.

However, such convergences have seen decreasing numbers of participants in recent years, as states increasingly win both the tactical and the public-relations battles.

Many explain the decreasing numbers seen at more recent convergences as one of the realities of organizing in the heightened security climate of the post-9/11 years. However, the antiglobalization movement had been demonized in the media from the start, with decontextualized coverage of the militant tactics of the black bloc in Seattle dominating mainstream coverage of the event. Likewise, intense state repression is nothing new for antiglobalization organizers, as thousands who braved the tear gas and rubber bullets saw in Quebec City in early 2001.

Indeed, the waning of the convergence model can be explained at least as much by activists’ own frustrations with the tactic as with state repression. With so much organizing effort directed at coordinating large one-off protests, convergences have increasingly been criticized for distracting from day-to-day, on-the-ground struggles that have more potential to achieve concrete gains. And while activists engaging in summit-hopping – the practice of following the world’s political and economic elite from global gathering to global gathering – saw themselves as contributing to anti-globalization solidarity, they generally remained detached from, or in some cases served only to alienate, the local communities in which they acted. The fact that summit-hopping is costly and time-consuming almost guaranteed that the activists that engaged in it had relative privilege, isolating them from those most affected by globalization’s ills.

As activists Manuel Pastor and Tony LoPresti aptly noted in an article in ColorLines magazine, convergence protesters could be found “swooping into town for the action, then departing, with the local community serving as a mere stage for the Kabuki play of protest and repression” (“Bringing globalization home,” June 2004). For critics both inside and outside the movement, convergences are little more than riot porn for activists seeking thrills, and have served neither to advance struggles against capitalism or other systems of domination, nor to win concrete gains in people’s lives.

Why, then, proceed with a convergence in Vancouver?

Global spectacle, local debacle

One of the most cogent challenges facing the anti­globalization movement in general, and the convergence tactic in particular, has been the difficulty of connecting the day-to-day issues of local communities to broader analyses of systems of global domination. With the Olympics, these connections have proven easier to make. Although the Olympics are a global phenomenon, the exploitation and marginalization that inevitably accompany them are rooted within an intimate and local context: global spectacle, local debacle. Anti-Olympics organizers have recognized that this connection between the global and the local has opened up opportunities for a convergence model more grounded in ongoing local struggles.

For many people who would have seen decisions made at meetings of the IMF, G8 or WTO as irrelevant to their daily lives, the anti-Olympics convergence has the potential to forge an explicit and real connection between global forces and local struggles. While the effects of the decisions made at global summits are dispersed in time and space and are not strongly connected to the communities in which the summit meetings occur, the impact of the Olympics on poor communities and nearby ecosystems is immediate and direct.

With nothing but broken promises of social housing hanging over East Hastings in Vancouver’s infamous downtown eastside, the fact that developers and the business lobby have shamelessly exploited the Olympics to their own advantage is widely recognized. New luxury developments have meant that rents have skyrocketed across the city, and critics have estimated that 1,150 units of low income housing have been lost in the years since Vancouver made its Olympics bid. At the same time that the numbers of homeless and impoverished populations have swelled, crackdowns on city bylaws have meant the de facto criminalization of poverty in an attempt to “clean up” the city in the lead-up to the Games. The Assistance to Shelter Act is the most recent in a series of policies that could be used to force the homeless off the streets and into temporary shelters, where the true social legacy of the Olympics will be invisible to international media. Public spending on Games-related infrastructure and venues is expected to reach up to $6 billion, leaving public debt as one of the more likely enduring legacies of the Olympics for local residents. (The province of Quebec only paid off its “Big Owe” 1976 Olympic debt in 2006.) And as the city gears up for the largest peacetime security force ever seen on Canadian soil and attacks on civil liberties ranging from the surveillance of activists to the establishment of protest zones draw criticism from even more moderate corners, the impacts felt by local communities will only intensify as the Games draw near.

As Anna Hunter of the Anti-Poverty Committee and the Olympic Resistance Network points out, “there is such a large number of Vancouver citizens that oppose the Games, not because of some political motivation, but because it has disrupted their lives, cost them money and invaded their communities.” This groundswell of opposition is significant, especially considering the sheer popularity of the Games and the multi-million dollar marketing machine supporting the Olympics. It also presents activists with the opportunity to encourage broader understandings of and resistance to capitalism, colonialism and other systems of domination.

Perhaps more significantly, this grounding within the local context allows preparations for a convergence to occur within the context of, rather than as a distraction from, ongoing local organizing. What can be cast loosely as “anti-Olympics organizing” has in fact been part of the day-to-day work of a wide variety of groups – from anti-poverty groups protesting evictions and gentrification, to indigenous groups as part of their centuries-long struggle against colonialism, to migrant justice organizers supporting the temporary workers engaged in building the venues and related infrastructure, to environmentalists resisting highway expansion. The quite literal convergence of these day-to-day struggles into a single, coordinated mass protest presents an opportunity for solidarity among multiple sectors that can serve as rich fertilizer for ongoing organizing in the city.

Resisting the Olympics has become intertwined with a variety of issues such that, for many activists, it is no longer just about opposing a one-time event. According to Harjap Grewal, an organizer with No One Is Illegal Vancouver and the Olympic Resistance Network, anti-Olympics organizing has in many ways strengthened rather than distracted from ongoing organizing. “It actually can add momentum, visi­bility, resources and energy to organizing already happening in the city and across the country,” he said.

According to Chris Shaw, author of the book Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games and long-time street medic at antiglobalization protests, the public, performative nature of the Games also makes them particularly vulnerable to protest in ways that other global gatherings are not. “All those financial meetings have become very adept at going to places like Qatar where you couldn’t get to. And what are you going to do in Qatar? The answer is not much. But if we can force the Olympics into that sort of thing, where they have to have their meetings in places where no one can get to, it destroys the entire machinery of the Olympics. How can you put tourists there and not protesters?”

This is not to suggest that a convergence in Vancouver does not have significant limitations as a tactic. Even if the Olympics were substantially disrupted, or even stopped through a convergence, the damage to the city and region is largely already done, with low-income housing demolished, unceded and ecologically sensitive land developed and surveillance and security measures already implemented. Whatever demands the organizers might hope to make, then, are largely moot by the time the Games actually take place. The best that convergence organizers can hope to achieve in this regard is to make a statement to the rest of the world, making it more difficult for the International Olympic Committee to stage Games in the future. In this sense, the benefits of an anti-Olympics convergence will largely accrue to future host cities (or those that manage to avoid becoming host cities), rather than to the local community.

Civil-liberty-threatening security and surveillance measures are a particularly troubling side effect of the locally rooted nature of convergence planning. While using large events like the Olympics to justify the implementation of security mechanisms is nothing new, the fact that the day-to-day activities of organizers are strongly connected to planning a convergence means that ongoing activities are now also subject to surveillance. This may have longer-term consequences for organizers in Vancouver, as the state mechanisms available to monitor and suppress dissent get stronger.

When the music’s over

After the Games are over, convergence organizers will face the challenge of using the momentum generated by the convergence to engage the local community and make concrete demands in responding to the mess they leave behind. While the willingness of the state to respond to most activist demands remains doubtful, there is some potential for this kind of mass mobilization to achieve real gains.

For instance, a groundswell of public outcry and threats of legal action prompted the modification of a draconian Vancouver bylaw in late November. This was a significant win for anti-Olympics organizers, as the bylaw would have severely restricted free speech and peaceful protest for the three-week period of the Games and set a dangerous pre­cedent for similar future legislation. Other demands of the Canadian state, sponsor corporations or the International Olympics Committee are less explicit or well-developed, and this may be one significant limitation for using the momentum of a convergence to strategically advance the aims of the movement.

Some activists, however, see convergence as a creative, oppositional tactic not dependent on making demands of dominating forces. Indeed, the spirit of convergences has always been one of building more democratic alternatives rooted in people – rather than state or corporate – power. While the goals of the convergence certainly include a significant disruption or shutdown of the Games that could mount an effective challenge to the institution, this is only one part of the picture. By building on the geographical rootedness of the anti-Olympics struggle, there is hope that the alternative expressed within a convergence can extend beyond the five days of protest and will serve to strengthen local social movements.

No Olympics on stolen land

Realizing this potential of convergences to truly build a rooted solidarity will largely depend on organizers’ ability to overcome the exclusions that have marked previous mass protests. Despite the fact that people of colour bear the brunt of globalization’s ills, the face of antiglobalization convergences has historically remained predominantly white. Overcoming this (perhaps unintentional) racist exclusion of people of colour from convergence organizing and protest has been a major goal of anti-Olympics organizers.

One of the more substantial shifts in organizers’ approach has been an explicit recognition that the Olympics, and any accompanying resistance, is taking place on unceded native land, and that this consideration should be central when considering the approaches and issues tackled within an anti-Olympics convergence.

“The convergence call of ‘No Olympics on Stolen Land’ is unprecedented in bringing to the forefront the recognition of Indigenous self-determination,” notes Harsha Walia, project coordinator at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre and an organizer with No One is Illegal Vancouver and the Olympic Resistance Network. “Rather than being treated as one of many issues, it creates the necessary anti-colonial foundation which has often been missing in previous mega-protests.”

This effort to root the protest in an anti-colonial framework represents a substantial shift not only in what is being talked about, but also who is doing the talking. Indeed, the anti-colonial focus came from the strength of native people organizing rather than any benevolence on the part of white organizers. Members of the Secwepemc and St’át’imc nations filed their official opposition to the Vancouver Games bid with the International Olympic Committee in 2002, long before the Olympics was on the mind of most other activists in the area. The convergence planned for February 2010, to a large extent, builds off the call made at an Intercontinental Indigenous Peoples’ Gathering in Sonora, Mexico, in 2007, where connections were drawn between resistance to the Olympics and ongoing resistance to colonialism across the continent.

The rooting of the movement in aboriginal demands for self-determination, rather than their mere inclusion within a set of priorities defined by non-natives, represents an important evolution in convergence organizing that has the potential to foster greater solidarity among natives and non-natives.

Unfortunately, putting this potential into practice has sometimes proven more difficult. As Walia explains, “At times it has led the movement to become paralyzed in a search for (often tokenized) Native leaders, feeling stuck in the dynamic of ‘conflicting opinions’ (as if Indigenous people are supposed to be a homogeneous group!), or the placing of an unrealistic and inappropriate burden for directing the movement on Indigenous people struggling just to survive. It is kind of the Leftist version of the white man’s burden.”

The need for non-natives to share the work of organizing the anti-Olympics convergence is particularly evident given the nearly $1 billion in security measures in place for the Games. While critics and activists of all races have faced harassment and intimidation by security officials in the months leading up to the Games, natives and other racialized individuals are likely to be the disproportionate victims of security and surveillance mechanisms. This presents a substantial barrier to participation in a convergence protest for many people of colour, and presents a particular responsibility for those who are involved to stay true to their commitments to support those most at risk.

Despite these tensions, there is nevertheless some hope that the anti-colonial foundation of the convergence will resonate in other cities and with future organizing efforts.

The future of convergences

If plans for the anti-Olympics convergence in Vancouver suggest anything, it is that the commonly repeated (though just as often ignored) refrain of “not using cookie-cutter tactics” does not imply that activists should simply throw out tactics that have been problematic in the past. The 2010 Olympics has presented organizers with the opportunity to adjust the convergence model in ways that address concerns.

“People say that convergences aren’t valuable, that we need to do something else, that it’s deflating, or it can’t be effective,” notes Grewal. “We could be fixing and improving things. Who is missing? What are the tactics we haven’t been using? As we address those things, convergences could keep having an impact.”

The anti-Olympics convergence has attracted interest precisely because it has taken a tactic known for being disconnected from communities and made it locally relevant, responsive to the demands of colonized people, and tactically attuned to the opportunities that convergence activism presents. In many ways, the plans for an anti-Olympics convergence have made use of the most effective elements of past convergences – the spirit of creativity and solidarity – to build a more grounded and more useful application of the tactic.

This reimagining of the convergence model will only become more essential as the opportunities for resistance multiply. “We’re not only going to be converging at the G8 and WTO anymore,” Grewal says. “We’re recognizing that systems of global domination and capitalism and colonization are rooted in these celebrations as well, these spectacles of sport.”

The success of the anti-Olympics convergence remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the convergence will not be judged exclusively by its success at disrupting the Games as a one-time event.

“Ultimately, our resistance over the last three years, and during the Olympics, will influence the next phase of resistance,” says Gord Hill, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw people and editor of No2010.com and WarriorPublications.com. “The post-Olympic scenario contains all the potential for greater social conflict.”

With the exacerbation of poverty from the Games and the public sector cuts and job losses that are likely as a result of massive government deficits, one can only hope that social movements will be up for the challenges – and opportunities – that the post-Olympic period presents. The legacy of an anti-Olympics convergence will ultimately be determined by its success at strengthening local movements – that is, by the relationships built and the people meaningfully engaged in the organizing.

Order this issue.

Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Subscribe to the digital edition.

Tags: , , , ,

Boosters’ millions: Better ways than the Olympics to spend $6.1 billion

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | 1 comment

Graphic courtesy of <a href=

By  Dawn Paley & Isaac Oommen
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

The latest estimate of the cost of the Olympics to be borne by the public is $6.1 billion. This figure includes the expansion of the Sea-to-Sky Highway, the construction of the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver rail link, the expansion of the Vancouver Convention Centre, the construction of an athletes’ village and various venues, and a ballooning security budget. The two-week sporting event is set to be the most expensive entertainment spectacle in B.C.’s history.

As the tab continues to grow, costs that were at first unquestioned are coming under increased scrutiny by journalists, critics and boosters of the Games alike. To give an idea how the money may have been better spent, Isaac Oommen and Dawn Paley looked into what $6.1 billion would buy in five key areas of public policy.

1. Education

Since 2001, the B.C. Liberals have made substantial cuts to education. Class sizes have grown, rural schools have shut down, children and teens get less support, and hot lunch programs and after-school activities have been scrapped. University students have seen their tuition spike while debt forgiveness initiatives have been cancelled.

“Educators don’t have enough money to do proper assessments, class sizes are huge, school sports programs have been cut,” said Marla Renn, a high school teacher active with the Olympic Resistance Network. “If there’s ever an earthquake, many schools don’t have properly engineered structures to ensure they won’t fall down on top of everyone inside.”

For the cost of the Vancouver-Richmond-Airport rail link ($2.05 billion), the province could:

• Carry out complete seismic upgrades to all B.C. schools. To date, $400 million of the total $1.5 billion investment necessary to carry out seismic upgrades has been allocated. ($1.1 billion)

• Operate a community college the size of Vancouver Community College, offering 140 programs and serving 25,000 students, for one year. ($100 million)

• Fund the annual operating budget for B.C. School Sports, an organization that coordinates extracurricular sporting activities for B.C. students. The government cancelled an annual $130,000 in funding to the group last fall. ($390,000)

• Build five new, 1,000-student secondary schools in B.C. ($250 million)

• Provide every student enrolled in B.C. public schools with a hot lunch every day for one school year. ($421.6 million)

2. Family services

“We need more family programs,” and less foster care, said Samantha Sam, an active member of the Power of Women group in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. There would be fewer children leaving reserves for Vancouver, says Sam, if there were better recreation facilities and programs on reserves.

A Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) study released in September 2009 found that one in four single mothers in Canada live in poverty, as do 14 per cent of single elder women and almost one out of every 10 children. The statistics are much worse for Indigenous women and families. A full 25 per cent of Indigenous children in Canada are growing up below the poverty line and a staggering 30 per cent are in foster care, according to the Native Women’s Association of Canada.

For a bit more than the cost of the expansion of the Vancouver Convention Centre ($883 million) and the construction of the Athletes’ Village ($1.2 billion), the Canadian government could:

• Provide for one year the minimum amount of additional funding First Nations communities across Canada need to safely care for their children in their homes and communities, according to CCPA calculations. ($130 million)

• Introduce a universal child care system across Canada. According to the CCPA’s Alternative Federal Budget, funding towards child care provides at least a two-to-one economic return on investment. ($2.2 billion)

3. Housing

“When they give homes to people, that’s when I’ll be happy,” said Beatrice Starr, a member of the Power of Women group. “Not shelters but homes, where they can have their privacy and live like real human beings.” The 2008 Metro Vancouver homeless count tallied 2,660 individuals sleeping on the street, representing an increase of over 137 per cent since 2002. “If we spent one billion dollars on housing in Vancouver, we could end street homelessness and make significant upgrades to many of the city’s aging and decrepit single-room-occupancy hotels,” said Laura Track, Pivot Legal’s housing campaign lawyer.

For a little more than the cost of the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion ($600 million), the city or province could:

• Build 3,200 units of housing in Vancouver, according to the Inner Cities Inclusiveness report prepared in 2002. ($647 million)

4. Community welfare and the arts

Raising welfare rates from their unjustifiably low levels is a requirement for creating a more equitable society. In addition, programs that improve the lives of all members of our communities have faced serious funding cuts. Arts programs in B.C. are slated to lose 88 per cent of their funding over the next two years. Libraries are facing further cuts and some city parks are on the verge of being shut down.

For less than the cost of building the various Olympic venues ($580 million), the province could:

• Raise welfare rates by 50 per cent in B.C. (2007 data) for one year ($500 million). Eliminating barriers to accessing welfare would cost an additional $200 million.

• Restore core funding for B.C. artists ($17.3 million).

• Restore city funding to the Vancouver Public Library and keep the Riley Park Branch of the Vancouver Public Library open ($1.4 million). The Riley Park Branch is marked for closure due to budgeting constraints.

• Restore funding for Literacy BC’s online programs and coordinators ($1.7 million). “In 2005, the province of B.C announced the golden goal of becoming the most literate jurisdiction on the continent,” said Judy Cavanagh, Executive Director of Literacy BC, in a press release. “Just four years later, key literacy funding is being cut.”

5. Transportation

Thousands of transit riders in Vancouver can attest to the system’s underfunding. Pass-ups are common because buses are too full to pick up passengers, many areas lack night service, and travel from the suburbs can be difficult. “Metro Vancouver is 500 buses short of what we need today,” said Ian Bruce of the David Suzuki Foundation. “Buses are the workhorses of the public transit system, where 80 per cent of the riders take one bus during their commute.”

For the minimum cost of the security budget ($900 million), Metro Vancouver’s regional transportation authority could:

• Acquire, operate and maintain 698 new buses, trolleys and community shuttles ($880 million). Such a purchase would bring the city in line with regional plans and greatly improve the quality of bus service in B.C.


The social issues that exist in Canada won’t be solved with money alone, but the examples above give an idea of just what could be bought for the cost of the 2010 Olympics. And as all levels of government continue to scale back social programs while generously funding wars and a two-week circus, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial resistance to the Games continues to grow.

Order this issue.

Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Subscribe to the digital edition.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Selling the Olympics in the schools

January 5, 2010 in Briarpatch Articles, Jan/Feb 2010: Responsibility to protest by briarpatch | No comments

(Photo: Elaine Briere)

(Photo: Elaine Briere)

By Jenn Hardy
Briarpatch Magazine
January/February 2010

In the name of education, British Columbia has spent at least half a million dollars teaching wee ones the awesomeness of the Olympics. In response, Olympics opponents are trying to counteract what they call “pro-Olympic propaganda” by introducing classroom workshops of their own.

The $500,000 Sharing the Dream program provides every school in the province with an Olympics “teachable moments” DVD that includes videos, podcasts, teacher guides, hyperlinks and brochures for teachers to use in their classes – all designed to build excitement about the Games.

“Olympic and Paralympic themes span across all courses in the B.C. school curriculum – from language arts to science, physical education to mathematics, social studies to fine arts, technology to career planning,” reads the Sharing the Dream website. “We urge you to embrace these educational opportunities and bring the excitement of the Games to your classroom.”

Olympics opponents dismiss the Sharing the Dream program as a brainwashing tool. “It is a blatant propaganda effort to bolster support for the Games,” says anti-Olympic activist and author of Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, Chris Shaw. “The same government is cutting off school sports programs.”

The Sharing the Dream program was launched in the wake of massive budget cuts to public education. These same cuts are affecting public school maintenance, staffing, CommunityLINK (a program that supports students in low-income communities), Parent Advisory Council funding and, ironically, $130,000 worth of provincial grants for competitive sports.

Anti-Olympics organizers aren’t short on reasons for opposing the Games. According to Shaw, founder of the watchdog group 2010watch, the Olympics are an assault on the poor, the environment and the public purse. Detractors also point out that the Games are being held on unceded Native land (B.C. territory that was never signed over to European settlers) over the objections of local Native groups.

In response to the Share the Dream program, Shaw and other activists are doing a little educating of their own. In August, the Olympic Resistance Network introduced Teach2010, a workshop geared to elementary and high school students, which aims to restore some balance to the Olympics debate.

The goal of Teach2010 is to provide teachers with resources to do something revolutionary: provide some critical perspectives on a complex and relevant issue.

Unlike Sharing the Dream’s well-funded program, Teach2010 has a budget of just $3,000 (all donated), and relies on a great deal of volunteer labour. Through Teach2010, organizers conduct workshops that teach educators about the issues surrounding the Olympics. They also host youth nights where kids do activities like silkscreening T-shirts. “It’s an opportunity for youth to get informed about the issues,” says organizer Marla Renn. “It gives participants the ability to respond through their creative expression.”

For Teach2010’s high school workshops, Renn, a schoolteacher, takes her small team into classrooms to facilitate discussions about the Olympics. “We begin to look at the issues surrounding the Olympics and then we step away and look at whether those things translate into reality,” she says. “What are the real impacts of the Olympics? If you had an opportunity to participate in the decision-making process, what would you spend $6 billion of public money on?” Students have suggested building hospitals and community centres, or housing everyone on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside without a home. They’ve even discussed buying an ice cream for everyone in the city.

Renn and the students discuss environmental impacts and dissect organizers’ claims that this will be the “greenest Games ever.” They talk about the motivations of stakeholders like the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), as well as sponsors and the mainstream news media.

It’s not entirely surprising that the Olympic resistance’s move into the classroom has itself been met with resistance.

Myriam Dumont, an elementary school teacher in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, tried to organize a Teach2010 workshop for teachers at her school in October 2009 to give them ideas for a balanced lesson about the Olympics.

The issue exploded when the Vancouver Sun reported that the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers Association (VESTA) was promoting a Teach2010 workshop. The association had simply put a link on their website to inform teachers that the workshop was taking place.

The Sun article caused a minor media frenzy, and a couple of days later, Sun columnist Cam Cole wrote a piece called “It’s elementary, my dear children: The Olympics are a sham,” in which he sarcastically attacks the Olympic Resistance Network and VESTA, accusing both parties of crushing children’s hopes and dreams.

“Nip those dreams in the bud, I say,” writes Cole. “Get ’em early. That’s the kind of preventive action that makes us all proud to pay your salaries.”

VESTA quickly distanced itself from the event, removing the informational link on its website and replacing it with a disclaimer. The media attention resulted in the cancellation of Dumont’s workshop and her holding it off school property.

“I saw it as an opportunity for teachers to get kids to start thinking about issues and what they can do, how it affects them, and taking action.” She says discussions about the Olympics are especially important in an inner-city Vancouver school, where pro-Olympic propaganda is everywhere.

Order this issue.

Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Subscribe to the digital edition.

Tags: , ,

Class-War Games: The financial and social cost of “securing” the 2010 Olympics

May 1, 2009 in Briarpatch Articles, May/June 2009: Crime & punishment by Andrew Angus | 4 comments

Photo by the Blackbird
Police videotape Olympic Resistance Network protesters in downtown Vancouver, February 12, 2009.

By Christopher A. Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe
Photos by the Blackbird
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009

On February 12, 2009, exactly one year before the opening of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler, the grim future of political freedom in British Columbia was on full display. Military and police flanked by helicopters rehearsed manoeuvres in Vancouver, where escalating harassment, intimidation and surveillance of activists had already begun. Those celebrating the event put aside concerns about the costly preparations for the Games. As the orchestrated magic took hold in Whistler Village, celebrants and athletes were swept up in the moment. They, like most of the mainstream media and all levels of government, were simply not going to think about the elephant on the slopes: security. Security has emerged as one of the largest single costs associated with the 2010 Olympics, and will carry significant costs for civil liberties as well.

To Olympic supporters it may seem churlish, even unpatri­otic, to speak of this billion-dollar elephant, question how it got there or ask how we can remove it before it trashes the place. Olympic boosterism has worked to exclude critical voices and suppress important public policy questions. For critics of the Games, the security apparatus currently being assembled is a major concern.

Photo by the Blackbird
A redecorated billboard at Canada Place, Vancouver, November 2008.

Challenging the Olympic mythology

Concerns about the Olympic Games extend beyond the billion dollars taxpayers will pay to provide security for the 17-day event or the lasting damage to civil liberties for people in Canada. The 2010 Olympic events are using the resources of Indigenous land which has never been legally ceded to the Canadian government, while neglecting the outstanding issues of Native communities. The environmental impacts of clear-cuts, destruction of bluffs and mountain ecosystems, road construction, gravel mining, massive consumption of resources, threats to fish and animal populations and accelerated approval processes for mining, logging, oil, gas and tourist infrastructure belie claims that these will be “the Green Games.” Growing numbers of people oppose the host of issues that accompany the modern Olympic Games: the commercialization of sport, lack of transparency in government, backroom deals for real estate and development interests, exploitative labour standards for migrant workers, promotion of corporate sponsors with appalling human rights and ecological records (including Nike, Shell, Royal Bank, Petro-Canada, Dow Chemical, Teck Cominco, General Electric, General Motors and Coca-Cola), and appropriation of public space.

Massive public debt (often billions of dollars) plagues host cities: Montreal has only recently paid off its 1976 Games and Vancouver’s share of the $6 billion cost of the 2010 Games continues to grow. As B.C. faces a poverty and housing crisis, efforts to forcibly remove visible homelessness from Vancouver and broken promises of social housing clash with the Olympic claims of social sustainability. Since the 1980s, the Games and related development have displaced over 3.5 million people worldwide.

The issues which unite Olympic critics are those which most threaten the carefully crafted Olympic image. Many groups are critical of the Games, some regarding specific aspects and others opposed to the entire scheme of the Olympics. Community groups in the Downtown Eastside, anti-poverty and Indigenous activists, environmentalists and civil libertarians have been exposing the negative impacts of hosting the Games to a local and international audience. One group that has united some of these elements is the Olympic Resistance Network, whose organizing slogan “No Olympics on Stolen Native Land” accents the fact that the Olympics will occur on unceded territories. That group and others are responding to a call to boycott and oppose the Games from the 2007 Indigenous Peoples Gathering in Sonora, Mexico. The Olympic Resistance Network holds public education forums, rallies and marches and has called for a public convergence to protest and disrupt the Games in 2010.

The high price of policing dissent

Vancouver’s bid book, submitted in 2002, projected a cost of $175 million for providing security for the proposed Vancouver/Whistler Olympic Games – a substantial sum, but still small by the standards of recent Games and other major events. The Group of Eight meeting held in Kananaskis, Alberta, in 2002 had a security tab of over $300 million for a three-day event that was vastly simpler in scope and geography. The Bid Corporation and the successor organization, the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (VANOC), have stuck with the projected number, both claiming that security “experts,” including the RCMP, had approved the $175 million estimate.

RCMP documents obtained through access to information refute this claim. A 2005 letter by the head of the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit (VISU) called the VANOC security budget “conceptual.” RCMP briefing notes from 2003 noted that the Mounties had never been consulted prior to the bid book numbers. Other RCMP documents showed that the force was more interested in managing public perceptions about Olympic security costs than in informing the public that they had been deliberately misled.

During this period, the true costs for security from other Olympic cities were revealed: $1.3 billion in Salt Lake City, 2002; $1.7 billion in Athens, 2004; $1.4 billion in Torino, 2006; and a projected $3 billion in London, 2012.

Finally, in October 2008, then-Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day stated that security costs would be vastly higher than the $175 million projection – the new estimate ranging from $400 million to $1 billion. Over time the numbers drifted toward the high-end estimate. Security agencies led by VISU continued to refuse to clarify the final numbers. Briarpatch has learned from one journalist with VISU contacts that the agency had no real idea of the cost: “They simply don’t know what it will all cost by 2010. There appears to be no bottom line.”

By the end of February 2009, it was finally acknowledged that the security bill would be over a billion dollars and could go even higher if potential threats emerged. These figures are only those projected for the provincial and federal governments, and don’t include the substantial costs to the City of Vancouver itself, including the Vancouver Police Department.

The publicized numbers for security forces for the B.C. Games are similarly underplayed. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 featured 35,000 police and other security personnel (four security personnel for each athlete), including 4,000 troops. The 2004 Olympics in Athens deployed 70,000 police and troops in addition to NATO’s Mediterranean naval fleet. For 2010, the estimates of the various security forces amount to 13,000 police officers and troops, plus 4,000 private security guards and U.S. military participation. In an era in which extraordinary security operations have become the norm, the official numbers for 2010 are incongruously low compared to recent Olympics and can be expected to go much higher.

Identifying the true “threat”: embarrassment

Much of the security planning appears driven by threat assessments conducted by the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, a branch of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The Integrated Threat Assessment Centre initially evaluated three main concerns for 2010 security. In order of severity, these were: foreign-based terrorism, crime and domestic protests. By the end of 2008, a document released through access to information had narrowed the scope. The concerns now were foreign terrorism, listed as a “low” level threat, and anti-Olympic demonstrations, now considered a primary threat, with a listing of “medium.” How demonstrations constituted a security threat or why they were considered more threatening than foreign terrorism was not made clear, though the Canadian government has hist­orically placed Indigenous, environmental and antiglobalization protesters high on its lists of internal security concerns, and those groups figure prominently in the communities planning to protest the Games.

Whatever threat of disruption the protests may constitute, soldiers and F18s are not the proper response to demonstrations, at least not in a functional democracy. All levels of government are spending an inordinate amount on military-style security, and the only likely targets are protesters and those whose glaring poverty threatens Vancouver’s public image. Primarily, the rationale seems to be framed by a fear of embarrassment, rather than any realistic concerns about physical security for athletes or the general public.

Photo by the Blackbird
Morning wake-up call courtesy of Vancouver’s police department, July 2008. “Watch for the Vancouver Police Department’s continued use of bylaw enforcement for minor acts like jaywalking, littering or sleeping in streets or parks against the homeless in an effort to get ‘no-go’ orders banning them from particular areas of the city,” warns David Eby of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Secrecy and social cleansing

These concerns about the exposure of embarrassing realities during the 2010 Games underlie attempts to remove the homeless and petty criminals from Vancouver. Such efforts have been stepped up, with the movement of so-called undesirables from B.C. to other provinces to face minor charges, previously considered not worth the cost of relocation. An RCMP officer in charge of the Vernon, B.C., detachment predicted “quite an aggressive displacement” of criminals and the homeless by Vancouver police, and warned that other municipalities will face increased social problems due to such tactics.

Those Vancouverites who are not targeted for removal will still have to contend with police searches, video surveillance and major restrictions on their movement and access to homes, workplaces and community services. Extensive areas surrounding major hotels, sporting venues and event locations throughout Vancouver and Whistler will have public video monitoring and police checkpoints requiring credentials and searches. There will be no-fly zones over downtown and most boat traffic will be barred from False Creek.

It is apparent who will bear the brunt of the anticipated crackdown. According to Harsha Walia, a Vancouver organizer with No One Is Illegal and the Olympic Resistance Network, these “Orwellian measures are not just an invasion of privacy for all residents of Canada. They will be disproportionately utilized in and beyond 2010 against Indigenous people, poor people, people of colour and other communities who are repressed and marginalized not only for what they say or do, but simply for who they are.”

Most of the preparations for 2010 policing and social cleansing have occurred in secret. VISU claims that this is for “operational security,” but this secrecy extends beyond deployment specifics and encompasses potential civil liberties restrictions, limits on the freedom of movement and plans for spending the $1 billion security budget. VANOC itself is not subject to freedom of information and access to information regulations, and has not been forthcoming with details in response to public requests for information.

Despite such secrecy, security operations at previous Olympics give an indication of how such massive budgets and intense security infrastructure may be used. Traditionally, host cities work to socially cleanse their communities of visible poverty as well as dissent. Former Olympic host cities including Athens, Atlanta and Los Angeles also relocated or isolated members of poor and minority communities, as Vancouver did during Expo 86. At a February 26 forum hosted by advocacy group Pivot Legal Society (the first at which VISU members were available for public questions), senior police officials stated that no such clearances were planned. In response to audience questions, however, it was acknowledged that homeless people living within security perimeters for Olympic events would be relocated.

Social cleansing can be achieved by many methods. David Eby of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association and Pivot Legal Society says to “watch for the Vancouver Police Department’s continued use of bylaw enforcement for minor acts like jaywalking, littering or sleeping in streets or parks against the homeless in an effort to get ‘no-go’ orders banning them from particular areas of the city and increased use of private security guards in public space to move the homeless along.” According to Laura Track of Pivot Legal Society, “People are afraid – I think rightly given the experience in Atlanta – that these tickets will be used as grounds to arrest and imprison people during the Olympics who have been unable to pay the fines.” Eby further warns that the B.C. Housing Minister has proposed allowing police to force the homeless into emergency shelters in inclement weather (such as during the Winter Games). VANOC has budgeted for a temporary shelter open only for the duration of the Olympics, instead of a long-term investment.

A history of home-grown political suppression

Antiglobalization protesters have been a major focus of Canadian security operations and subjected to police abuses and violence in contexts similar to the Olympics. Canadian trade meetings have featured monitoring, intimidation and infiltration of political opponents by security forces. The 2007 meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership in Montebello, Quebec, for instance, saw the on-video exposure of police provocateurs trying to incite violence within demonstrations.

Other events, such as the 2001 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, the 2001 Pacific Northwest Economic Region meeting in Whistler and the 2002 Group of Eight meetings in Kananaskis have shown the extent of police interference and violence with groups exercising free expression. The Group of Eight meeting in Kananaskis included the instruction that police and military could “shoot to kill” demonstrators who entered the secured zone, even for peaceful civil disobedience. Indigenous activists, already heavily targeted by VISU, have long faced a greater level of police and military abuses, with violence and death occurring during police sieges against Natives in traditional territories. In separate Indigenous land reclamations in 1995, thousands of rounds of ammunition were fired against activists at Gustafsen Lake, B.C. (injuring one), and in Ipperwash, Ontario, Dudley George was killed by the Ontario Provincial Police.

A notable local example of restrictions on civil liberties occurred in November 1997, when the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus, adjoining Vancouver, hosted the leaders’ summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. The excessive use of physical force, pepper spray and police interference against non-violent demonstrators surprised many, but such tactics continue to be utilized by Canadian police. Later legal proceedings revealed an extensive surveillance effort against even mainstream peace and environmental organizations and small non-threatening groups like the Raging Grannies – older women who wear funny hats and shawls to sing protest songs. Photos and descriptions of potential anti-APEC activists were distributed to police for monitoring and eventual pre-emptive arrests of some organizers.

The office of then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien promised authoritarian leaders such as Indonesia’s General Suharto that they could attend APEC without fear of “embarrassment.” To keep this promise, UBC’s administration imposed a blanket restriction on any political signs or demonstrations along motorcade routes or anywhere remotely near the leaders’ meeting place. The Prime Minister’s Office specifically requested that protests be isolated to fenced-off areas of campus where they could not be witnessed by world leaders. Not only were signs seized from individuals, residences and offices (even those far from the meeting place), but people were arrested for holding signs (one reading simply, “Democracy, Human Rights, Free Speech”) that might have been read by a dictator in a passing limousine.

The involvement of politicians in planning security and restrictions on protest was revealed but never fully explored, since the RCMP’s Public Complaints Commission focused on bland recommendations and minor reprimands. However, even the flawed report declared that the right to protest must mean the “right to be seen and heard.” Nevertheless, the next time Prime Minister Chrétien returned to Vancouver in 1998, dozens of non-violent protesters were attacked by police, whose weapons escalated from pepper spray to batons. Many fear a further escalation in police violence at demonstrations against the 2010 Olympics.

Policing and the “right to be seen and heard”

The recommendations that came out of the APEC hearing have seemingly been ignored by those planning security for the 2010 Games. Promises to APEC leaders by Canadian officials that there would be controls on signs and public assembly are similar to those given to the International Olympic Committee by the City of Vancouver. UBC has agreed to restrictions on non-Games signs during Olympic events, but the details of this agreement are being kept from students and student government. Garth Mullins, a local organizer involved in the APEC protests and hearings and a member of the Olympic Resistance Network, notes, “The RCMP has learned little since APEC and the inquiry. Led by the Mounties, VISU seems to be going down that same tired road of intimidating activists, infiltrating and spying on social movements and criminalizing dissent.”

Protest pens (fenced-in areas for demonstrators that are isolated from the public) and control of political displays are already planned for the Games under the guise of “free speech zones.” Once again, Canadian Charter rights to free expression seem to be limited; if a protest pen is a “free speech zone,” then what is the rest of Canada? “The worst thing that could occur is a repetition of all the mistakes from APEC,” suggests Eby. “The key difference between then and the potential errors now is that the rights violations at APEC were focused in just one part of Vancouver, UBC, where here Olympic events will be taking place across the city, and for over two full weeks.”

The City of Vancouver has already approved expanded bylaw powers to control “illegal” signs (those not authorized by the Olympics), leafleting, public performances (such as street theatre) and access to public areas near Olympic venues. Council’s bylaw changes may allow police and city officials to enter private homes, businesses and cars to remove unapproved advertising and anti-Olympic signs with “limited notice” and levy $10,000-a-day fines. The host city commitments include removing signs that are not part of the Olympics or those of Olympics’ sponsor corporations.

Within the same council motions that curtail public freedoms, VANOC and Olympic sponsors were being liberated from current city bylaws. Vancouver plans to relax building, zoning, noise and sign regulations to facilitate Olympic events and promotions, while restricting those that apply to non-Games activities or messages. Although city council claims that its concern is to reduce “ambush marketing,” it has refused to clarify these powers or specify their use in the context of freedom of expression rights. Meanwhile, every inch of outdoor advertising has already been bought by the Games and their sponsors for the duration of the Olympics.

In January 2009, city council met to vote on several Games-related motions, including the political controls outlined above. After many people spoke out against increased Olympic funding and new bylaw powers which would reduce public displays of speech, expression and assembly, council approved the motions without alteration. A recommendation for a sunset clause failed, as did a proposed amendment which stated that these powers were not to be used to restrict Charter rights.

Meanwhile, intelligence gathering, intimidation of organizers and attempts to recruit informants is intensifying throughout the Lower Mainland, Vancouver Island and in First Nations communities. Dozens of activists have already been questioned or approached for information, including people who had spoken out to council against the bylaw changes who were approached by police on the steps of City Hall. VISU officers regularly enter reserves to conduct “home visits” and attend community meetings unrelated to the Olympics.

As activists were preparing for an Olympic Resistance Network march on the day of the one-year countdown to the Games, a vehicle with several march participants was stopped by police for a “random ID check,” demanding ID from all the vehicle’s occupants. Although by law passengers of a vehicle do not have to identify themselves to police, the Vancouver Police Department detained the group for 40 minutes and intimidated them into complying. The office that they had left, that of the Anti-Poverty Committee, also involved in anti-Olympic organizing, had had its front door dusted for fingerprints by the Vancouver Police Department just a day before.

It would seem that Olympic opponents and Indigenous activists are being monitored in the same way as anti-APEC protesters were, with the potential for police abuses, surveillance, harassment and pre-emptive arrests.

In response to these tactics, activist groups and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association have urged VISU to stop harassing anti-Olympic activists. The Olympic Resistance Network has announced that their group will not meet privately with security forces, as VISU’s object appears to be to intimidate activists and restrict freedoms of assembly, mobility and expression. Even city council has urged VANOC to hold open community consultations (though it is unlikely they would be effectual in altering proposed security) before security plans are finalized, as VANOC had originally pledged to do.

VISU has told the media that they are “consulting” with activists and civil liberties advocates, but members of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association who attempted to discuss the political implications of security planning with VISU “ran into a brick wall,” says Eby.

Photo by the Blackbird
Olympic Resistance Network protesters march past the offices of CTV in downtown Vancouver, February 12, 2009.

The 2010 legacy

The military and police rehearsals of Exercise Silver, which took place in Vancouver in February, included 1,000 members of the police and military as well as surveillance aircraft and armoured personnel carriers. An expanded operation, Exercise Gold, planned for the fall of 2009, will see the security forces attempt to impress upon Vancouver their complete control of the city and its population before the Games even arrive.

“I believe the 2010 Games will be our winter of discontent,” says Mullins. “Given what we have seen in the past and in the lead-up to the Games, expect a rather draconian crackdown on dissent. We will see the same intimidation, pre-emptive arrests, disinformation and agents provocateurs, but this time there is a $1 billion security budget, military deployments and a multi-agency police body with a large staff dedicated to controlling political expression. Also, the mainstream media is even more accommodating than usual, since many are actual sponsors of the 2010 Games, with a financial stake in how the Games are perceived.

“If it takes a police state to hold the Olympics, it’s just not worth doing in the first place.”

Laura Track from Pivot Legal adds, “Protest groups will use the forum of the Games to raise issues around poverty, aboriginal rights, homelessness and other concerns. Without consultation beforehand it is far more likely that there will be repression, arrests and, potentially, violence.”

Activists and residents are concerned that the planned security measures and restrictions of political freedoms for Olympic events will be permanent and used as a blueprint for other cities to copy. Expanded bylaw powers approved by the City of Vancouver are described in that motion as a “template for future special events.” The increased ability to limit free speech, expression and assembly will already be in place the next time the city sees fit to do so.

“We have every reason to worry that much of the security infrastructure will remain behind because that is the typical Olympic legacy if you look at other host cities,” says Eby. “The B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner has warned that there will be no free passes for government to keep the surveillance cameras up after the Games, but every indication is that deals are being cut right now to ensure that the cameras are being left behind.” In Sydney, Athens and other host cities, public space restrictions and closed-circuit television cameras that were installed for the Olympics remained long after the Games were over. On March 26, Vancouver approved funding for CCTV during the Games; although it was described as temporary, it included no requirements that the technology ever be removed. By April 3, additional CCTV had been approved on an ongoing basis for Vancouver and other B.C. cities.

On the day of the one-year countdown to the Games, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge spoke in Whistler. “Security investments always leave a good legacy on security for the country,” Rogge said. “Whenever the Games are finished, everything that has been built, the expertise that has been acquired, the hardware that has been put in place, is serving the country and the regions for decades to follow.”

Such a massive and costly security apparatus does indeed leave a legacy, since Olympics security expansions typically remain after the Games are over, facilitating increased surveillance and expanded powers to suppress political freedoms. As Harsha Walia points out, “This fortification of the security apparatus serves two primary purposes that have little to do with the propaganda of ‘our safety.’ The first is to normalize a state of fear that can readily be manipulated by the state and corporate security firms. The second is to legitimize the criminalization of resistance.” Considering that Canada plans to host another Group of Eight meeting as well as discussions on the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2010, the Olympic-style policing of expression and control of public space may become the rule rather than the exception.

Professor Helen Lenskyj has documented the social impacts of modern Olympic Games, particularly on civil liberties. In “The Olympic Industry and Civil Liberties: The Threat to Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly” she writes, “The analysis reveals patterns of Olympic industry threats to civil liberties – most notably, to a free press and freedom of assembly – in recent bid and host cities in Europe, Canada, the United States and Australia. It is particularly alarming to note that the everyday practices of Olympic industry officials – their cynical ‘management’ of Olympic news, their co-optation of elected representatives, the sense of entitlement with which they conduct their business, and the ‘legacies’ of harsh law-and-order legislation – prompt relatively little concern or outrage.”

A police state seldom starts with tanks in the streets. It can begin with television cameras on every corner or intimidation and abuse of the poor, people of colour and political activists. Military-style policing, security infrastructure buildups and suppression of dissent are common features of modern Olympic Games, and not just in places like Beijing. As B.C. prepares for the flag-waving spectacle of the 2010 Games, the elephant on the slopes – the massive security apparatus and its political and economic costs – is settling in as a permanent resident.

Order this issue.

Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Olympic Profits: The 2010 Games versus Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

July 21, 2008 in Aug 2008: Olympics vs. the Downtown Eastside, Briarpatch Articles by Andrew Angus | 5 comments

By Christopher A. Shaw
Briarpatch Magazine
August 2008

“I’m watching things speed up in my own city, Vancouver, as legislators tighten the noose around society’s most defenceless members. In the lead-up to 2010′s Olympic orgasm for developers, the city council has passed laws to keep street people from sitting on park benches or reclining in parks. Behind this crazy-making effort to create a ‘civil city’ is a conception of humans as rubbish.”

Geoff Olson, “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be,” Common Ground, July 2007


“The law in its majesty prohibits rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.”

Anatole France

Home to legions of homeless people, drug dealers and users, sex trade workers and the working poor, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside suffers levels of disease that are comparable to the worst found in the Third World and crime rates on persons and property that exceed all of the rest of Vancouver combined. A sense of defeat hovers over much of Hastings Street like a fog. But in defiance to circumstance, there is pride here, too, and community. It’s more than possible to imagine that the Downtown Eastside with its vibrant history would blossom in thousands of ways if only the various levels of government cared enough to help. That government doesn’t care speaks volumes to social priorities in Vancouver’s headlong rush to be a “world-class” city, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the handling of the Downtown Eastside and its inhabitants in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics.

Those who only drive through the Downtown Eastside en route to somewhere else tend to see only the long lines at the soup kitchens, the addicts congregating in alley ways, the hookers on their stroll and the homeless sleeping on benches and in doorways. Some, though, don’t see Third World misery, but rather opportunity and a brighter future-for themselves, the developers. Instead of a vast urban wasteland filled with the homeless lining up for food, they see a queue of yuppies ready to live on the edge, buying upscale $500,000 one-bedroom condos overlooking the squalor in the streets below.

All these developers needed to make their dreams a reality was a spark to light the fire that would drive out the rabble. The eternal flame of Mount Olympus served the purpose quite nicely. In 2003, the spark caught and dreams became reality: the Olympic machine was coming to town, and with it, the power to gentrify the Downtown Eastside.

“All the developers needed to make their dreams a reality was a spark to light the fire that would drive out the rabble. The eternal flame of Mount Olympus served their purpose quite nicely.”

Closures, evictions, and other forms of “economic cleansing”

Before the 2010 Games were Vancouver’s, the bedbug-ridden hotels in the Downtown Eastside were fairly strictly policed; city inspectors routinely cited the owners for safety and hygiene violations. To avoid fines, the owners had to comply with what were really the most minimal of regulations. After the 2005 civic election, with the pro-Olympics Non-Partisan Association triumphant, the city’s attitude abruptly seemed to change. Now, rather than fine the owners, the city began closing the offending hotels.

Often, with only hours’ notice, residents were dumped onto the streets to join the thousands of others who wander the alleys by day and sleep on the sidewalk by night. Anti-poverty groups such as the Pivot Legal Society, the Anti-Poverty Committee and the Downtown Eastside Residents Association say a number of hotels have closed in this manner, adding many more people to the legions of the homeless. According to David Eby of the Pivot Legal Society, a total of 1,314 rooms that formerly housed low-income individuals have been closed or converted to other uses since the awarding of the Games to Vancouver in 2003.

Infographic by Rose Zgodzinski

*These figures are drawn from the Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness’ triennial homelessness count, and are widely acknowledged, even by count organizers, to underrepresent the true extent of homelessness in Vancouver.

Michelle Patterson, a researcher and adjunct professor at SFU’s faculty of health sciences and a volunteer in the count, estimated in an April 2008 Georgia Strait article that the actual number of homeless people in Vancouver was closer to 8,000, far higher than the official figure of 2,592. (Infographic: Rose Zgodzinski)

The city claims that the hotel closures are the simple result of enforcing bylaws for the safety of the residents of the closed hotels, but the Pivot Legal Society, the Anti-Poverty Committee and the Downtown Eastside Residents Association have a more likely explanation: the city is helping landlords close the hotels deliberately because they want to flip the property so that it can be sold to developers. The developers, in turn, plan to tear the old buildings down and put up hotels to fill with Olympic tourists in 2010. After the Games have gone, the upscale hotels will be converted to condos for the urban upwardly mobile, and many believe Vancouver will see more of the urban gentrification that accompanied the city’s fabled Expo ’86.

“Economic cleansing” is the ticket, and Mayor Sam Sullivan has the plan. If the Downtown Eastside is ugly and drug infested, he can sweep it all away courtesy of Project Civil City, Sullivan’s less than subtle manoeuvre to rid Vancouver of the relics of years of institutional neglect. Or maybe the city could ship the homeless out to other parts of the province “for treatment,” as the province’s Liberal Forests Minister recently suggested, the idea eerily reminiscent of the wholesale urban clearances of the poor in the run-up to Atlanta’s Olympics in 1996. The statement seemed likely to be a trial balloon, sent up to gauge public reaction.

Mayor Sullivan, the Non-Partisan Association, the provincial government and their real estate developer backers can see a new Kitsilano (an upper-middle-class enclave that was once dominated by artists and activists) arising out of the drug dens of the Eastside. Did the Olympics and the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) do this? Not directly, but those involved knew it would come to pass. Indeed, the Vancouver 2010 Bid Corporation knew, too, even as it and the city made their empty promises that no one would get left out of the Olympic legacies. The promise of “inclusivity” was not really meant for the city’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Vancouver’s red zone

Photo by Christopher A. Shaw

Cameron Bishop lives on the street near the center of the Broadway corridor, a corridor that runs east to west across the city. Bishop is in his early 40s, slim, bearded, with a ball cap covering longish receding hair. He’s been on Vancouver’s harsh downtown streets for over a decade, pretty much from the time he came out of the Canadian Army where he served in the infantry.

Bishop knows guns; he’s certainly seen his share of them in his life, many recently. Vancouver police officers have taken to placing their revolvers up against his head at night while he lies sleeping on the ground. During one such incident, the officer told him: “It’s the Olympics or you, and it ain’t you, so you’d better move on.”

Bishop has been threatened with beatings and worse if he stays in the area, threats that suddenly became reality when he was set upon by unknown assailants and severely mauled. He’s also been handed court summonses for loitering, for begging, for whatever the police want to charge him with. One officer told him that he was banned from the entire Broadway corridor, “red zoned.” He faces fines that he cannot possibly pay, or jail time, if he doesn’t move on. But move to where? Like the homeless across the city, Bishop has his own local community of fellow homeless. He is also afraid of the far more hostile streets of the Downtown Eastside.

The area where Bishop lives didn’t have a homelessness problem before the 1990s. The Fairview district of the city has historically been an upscale district with high-end condos and restaurants, all within a long stone’s throw of Vancouver’s City Hall and General Hospital. The urban poor and the homeless then were across False Creek, pretty much segregated in the Downtown Eastside. This all changed in the 1990s as government cutbacks spilled hundreds, then thousands, more onto the streets across the city.

No one knows how many of the homeless live in and around Fairview, but the scale of the problem can well be estimated from the dozen or more who congregate in the few short blocks between City Hall and the hospital. And it’s not just in Fairview, but in districts across Vancouver, even in the surrounding municipalities. Poverty in the Lower Mainland didn’t originate with the Olympics, but there was a remarkable coincidence in the extent of it. As cited above, the rate of change makes it difficult not to conclude that there was some sort of cause-and-effect relationship.

Red-zoning, itself, was definitely a by-product of the Olympics coming to Vancouver, as were the various punitive pieces of provincial and municipal legislation. Such legislation serves to highlight the utter failure of the different levels of government to actually address the gnawing poverty that affects so many. In the process, it demonstrates to anyone with an ounce of social conscience the chasm between a world in which the Olympics are the party of a lifetime and another, harsher world, where the Games are yet another kick in the teeth to those already battered to their knees.

The implications of red-zoning for civil liberties are not trivial either, not for the homeless, not for Olympic opponents, ultimately not for anyone.

Criminalizing poverty

Sam Sullivan came back from his Torino flag-waving adventure of 2006 determined to “clean up” the city before 2010. He could have actually chosen to keep promises to the poor and provide the 3,200 housing units that would end the current wave of homelessness in the city. Instead, he and the Non-Partisan Association decided to legislate the problem away. Thus was born Project Civil City, Sullivan’s path to ending the poverty problem by making its victims criminals and treating them as such.

The city’s Project Civil City, as launched in 2006, set four main targets to be achieved by 2010. First, it aimed to eliminate homelessness, with at least a 50 per cent reduction-the “how” not specified, and at absolute variance with the lack of funding for the housing that would be required to meet this goal. Second, the plan called for eliminating the open drug market with at least a 50 per cent reduction. How? More cops, obviously. Third, Civil City planned to eliminate the incidence of “aggressive panhandling” by 50 per cent.

Reducing panhandling so as not to inconvenience rich Olympic tourists was nothing new; in fact, several years earlier provincial legislation, notably the “Safe Streets” Act, saved the good citizens of the province from “aggressive squeegee kids.” Finally, Civil City called for a 50 per cent increase in “the level of public satisfaction” with the city’s handling of public nuisance and annoyance complaints. What this meant seemed very open to interpretation, but at the least, it suggested that the “public” in question was more the Vancouver Board of Trade type than average citizens, the latter including many who wanted real solutions that actually helped rather than punished the poor.

Overall, there were some 54 sub-recommendations, 10 of which Sullivan wanted undertaken immediately by city council, while a more comprehensive implementation plan was being activated.

These recommendations included introducing “dumpster-free alleys,” or, in other words, take away one of the few sources of income for homeless people by removing their access to recyclable bottles and cans, again a proposal that had previously surfaced in other Olympic host cities. The city also proposed to “conduct a public awareness campaign on the negative impacts of providing money to panhandlers,” just to ensure that they really had no possible source of income short of crime.

There were multiple recommendations about more police, police auxiliaries, bylaw enforcement officers, prosecutors and the presence of security cameras everywhere, the latter earning a pointed comment from civil liberties groups calling the recommendation “a serious erosion of a citizen’s right to appear in public spaces without being monitored.” There was also a raft of proposals for a Community Court, ticketing and fines, etc. And, amongst all the punitive measures, the city proposed to “conduct a study of our homeless population.” Hence, first penalize those you’ve put on the streets, then figure out why they are there, as if you don’t already know.

And all under the banner of the five colored rings, supposedly the symbol of peace and brotherhood.

Olympic promises: Just more carbon emissions

The empty promises of the Bid Corp and the City of Vancouver seemed, for many, to guarantee that the Olympic Games would be for everyone. Although the environment didn’t really score a promise as such, Vancouver’s poor and homeless sure did. But, just as surely as Vancouver’s temperamental weather can shift from brilliant sunshine in an azure sky to torrential downpours 15 minutes later, so too, the promise to the poor began to dissipate. What had been an officially unbreakable “promise” in the bid period became a “commitment” post-bid, drifting to a “goal,” then a “hope,” before being finally abandoned altogether.

Even late in the process, VANOC’s sub-boss John Furlong had said: “Our housing commitments are quite specific. They fall into three categories. We have committed $30 million to the direction of the village in Vancouver, with that commitment we will of course be assured of 250 units of housing that fall into the category of non-market social housing.”

Alas, the City of Vancouver was soon to bail on the 250 units, the number dropping by 90 per cent not long after Furlong’s words were spoken. According to a report prepared by city staff for Vancouver’s City Council, “It’s not clear whether any more than 10 per cent of the 250 units of social housing at the site can be reserved for the poor.” Then even that minimal guarantee was dropped.

The same report noted that of the 3,200 units promised overall, it was “questionable” if the units could be built by 2010. In fact, it was clear that if construction of the units didn’t start by a drop-dead date of October 2007, it simply couldn’t happen by 2010 at all. The drop-dead date came and went with no start on construction.

All in all, the report suggested that a total of 25 recommendations made by various stakeholders in the so-called Inner City Inclusiveness Tables were not going to be met. There had never been any real plan to do so. The exercise from the onset had not really been to “include” the poor, it had been to hoodwink the public with the idea that they would.

All that anti-poverty advocates could do was complain and try to raise the issue at the international level. While such publicity might have been embarrassing for Vancouver, nothing changed in the realities on the streets.

Resistance and hope

By 2006 it had become obvious to the various anti-poverty groups in Vancouver that not only were poverty and homelessness increasing, but the City of Vancouver was not going to do anything about it. The most radical of these groups, the Anti-Poverty Committee, staged a series of protests and actions that served to make government and VANOC nervous. Each time VANOC would hold a special event, the Anti-Poverty Committee was there. At the unveiling of VANOC’s “Olympic clock,” one activist grabbed the microphone and shouted obscenities against the Olympics. Native activists drummed and sang in protest, drowning out the songs of the natives that VANOC had brought out for the event.

The Anti-Poverty Committee began to get media coverage, and while the latter tended to be very negative, the genie was out of the bottle; many British Columbians were forced to face the fact that poverty in Vancouver had increased as a consequence of the 2010 Olympic developments. The city struck back: Anti-Poverty Committee members were arrested and charged, and another anti-poverty group allied to them, the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, had their city funding cut off.

Vancouver City Council had dug in its heels, and Mayor Sullivan declared that the city was not going to “surrender to hooligans.” They weren’t going to do anything serious about the underlying poverty issues either. The promises to the poor, promises that had led many social progressives to vote yes in the plebiscite, were simply abandoned. Although many Vancouverites noted the broken promises, a large number didn’t really seemed to care, at least if the mainstream media were to be believed. In this regard, Vancouver mimicked Sydney where, “Sydney Olympic organizers relied on ‘Olympic spirit’ discourse to diffuse public outrage on the numerous occasions when Olympic officials failed to live up to the lofty standards touted in pseudo-religious rhetoric.”

And just in case anyone in the Anti-Poverty Committee or any other organization had thoughts of doing anything even more radical, the Olympic security machine was beginning to sputter to life. As we will see, the 2010 security forces might not be able to do much against a real external threat, but perhaps that wasn’t to be their main purpose: Maybe their raison d’être would be to contain domestic Olympic opponents.

Christopher A. Shaw is a professor of Ophthalmology at the University of British Columbia, the lead spokesperson for 2010 Watch, and a policy and media analyst for the Work Less Party. This article is excerpted from Shaw’s book Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, published this year by New Society Publishers.

Order this issue.

Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Tags: , , , , , ,