Protest

The Olympic War is on

  Showdown at Eagleridge Bluffs succeeds in radicalizing the privileged.  

By Chris Shaw

The Matrix is based on the premise that the world we know is an illusion. The hero, Neo, is offered a choice: He can take a blue pill and go back to his previous state of blissful ignorance, or he can take the red pill and the real world will be revealed, a world in which machines have enslaved humanity. Neo chooses the red pill and can no longer go back, can no longer not know the world as it really is.

May 15 was a red pill day for some West Vancouver residents as they awaited judgement on two actions brought before the BC Supreme Court. The first was filed by Peter Kiewit and Sons, the US-based construction company hired by the government to provide upgrades to the Sea to Sky highway in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Kiewit sought the removal of the protest camp at Eagleridge Bluffs.

That protest camp is comprised mostly of West Vancouver residents-cum environmental activists driven by an intransigent Liberal government bent on seeing a four-lane highway run through a formerly-protected and unique ecosystem.

The activists from the Coalition to Save Eagleridge Bluffs are not what one normally sees at environmental protests. Political sensibilities on the north side of English Bay tend more toward the belief that they can have it all: They can support the Olympics with its “Green Games” notion while still preserving their beloved Bluffs. Up until now, many have refused to accept the radical notion that the Olympics are never green, and that the entire scam that makes up the Games agenda at the local level is based on real estate and über development.

Trying to have it both ways hasn’t served them well. Kevin Falcon, the minister of transportation pushing the highway development through, told a recent audience that he would “shit upon” the protesters for defying him.

The West Vancouver protesters want a “greener” four-lane tunnel under the Bluffs and they presented their own legal action: The entire project has not been properly assessed for environmental impact, the Coalition says, and they want an injunction to halt the construction company.

On May 15, both sides gathered in BC Supreme Court for the showdown. Grist took the weekend to write his decision, a sign Coalition members saw as hopeful: Maybe their efforts to craft a rational argument succeeded and the Court would support their position. For them, the hard line of Falcon was absurd: The overland route is environmentally a disaster, it overrides community rights, and it may not even be cheaper or safer in the long run.

The Coalition’s national leaders, Dennis Perry and Bruce MacArthur, sat down in the first row behind their lawyer, Cameron Ward, and his one assistant. Ward is well known in Vancouver as the lawyer who represented the students at the Hughes inquiry into the RCMP’s pepper-spraying at the APEC protests in 1997. Perry wore a suit that sported a Vancouver Olympics lapel pin, with the almost plaintive message, “We love the Games! Why are they doing this to us?” Activist grandmother Betty Krawcyzk sat a few rows back. Then came the lawyers for Kiewit, six of them in suits and power ties.

Judge Grist came in ten minutes past noon and we all rose as he took his seat. Grist spoke quietly. Early on he mentioned how good a job the province did in “consulting” the people of West Vancouver, a notion that Coalition members adamantly refute. This is the first inkling that things were about to go awry. He dealt with the Coalition’s petition first, slowly and deliberately dismissing each of the three key points put forward.

With the Kiewit application, Grist just as slowly and deliberately accepted each point. Citing the Transportation Act, Grist gave Kiewit and the government everything they wanted: a 12-month injunction complete with a “bubble zone” of 25 to 300 meters to keep the protesters away from the site. Out of respect for the right to protest, the Coalition was given the right to watch the destruction of the Bluffs from some vantage points. Kiewit’s lead attorney offered to draft the details of the bubble zone for inclusion in the injunction; Grist was happy to accept the offer.

At a press scrum outside, members of the Coalition talked about continuing the blockade, but it’s clear they were in shock. Their red pill moment had arrived. One member in a wheelchair told the assembled reporters that “Gordon Campbell has just started the Olympic war,” a notion reinforced a few minutes later as a defiant Dennis Perry emerged. “This battle was lost, but the war is not over,” he told the reporters. The camp will remain.

With their eyes opened, many at Eagleridge were talking about secret real estate deals between the British Properties and the City of West Vancouver, about how the four-lane highway was the option chosen because, unlike a tunnel, a highway has off-ramps, and off-ramps lead to housing developments.

What the Olympics really represents is this: Everything—rocks, trees, bluffs, people (especially politicians, apparently)—is for sale; development is inevitable until there is nothing left to develop. Opposed to this is the view that the Earth and all of its inhabitants are sacred, that sustainability is the key to humanity’s survival, that we hold the Earth in trust for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.

The protests at Eagleridge need to grow, to link up with the struggles for every other “Eagleridge” around the province. It’s time to take sides. Reinforcements are already en route from the St’at’imc and the Squamish Nations.