Everyone knows by now that the Bush administration is shamelessly aggressive in its pursuit of corporate welfare. When America plunged into the Iraqi quagmire, the first and only things the military secured were the oil fields. That’s because the American president and vice president, two career oil men, went in there so that American banking, oil, and infrastructure companies (perhaps the biggest profiteer of which, Halliburton, still pays Cheney in the form of stock options and deferred salary) could supplant their European and Russian counterparts and make off like bandits without remorse or oversight. Regrettably, countless Iraqis and Americans have paid and will continue to pay dearly for Bush’s ridiculous war.

We often scoff at our American neighbours’ hubris. While the wealthy minority of Americans, whose support for this war was bought off with unsustainable tax cuts, live the good life from behind the ivy-covered walls of their cloistered gated communities, the rest of the country struggles under the yoke of debt to pay off skyrocketing health insurance premiums and post-secondary tuitions.

As the body count rises and personal and federal debt continue to spiral out of control, countless Americans must be asking themselves why they elected these corpulent corporate cronies into office.

With a shrug and a smirk, we Canadians (outside of Alberta, that is) tend to look down on the yanks for their short-sighted, knuckle-dragging bellicosity. We prefer to think of ourselves as cut from an altogether different cloth. After all, we make a point of prioritizing looking after the disadvantaged and the environment because we’re smarter and more civilized. But perhaps that’s the most uncivil lie of all.

Like America’s commander in chief, BC’s elected premiere is a privileged, nepotistic, drunk-driving, beady-eyed corporate crony. But the similarities don’t end there. Though it is beyond Gordo’s purview to wage war on foreign nations (that’s Harper’s job), the Work Less Party’s brave new documentary, Five Ring Circus, exposes the myriad ways that our government is using the 2010 Olympics to wreak havoc on BC itself.

The movie centers around the well-publicized mandate to make this the greenest, most sustainable Olympics yet. With pinpoint precision, the film goes through the specific promises, one by one, and reveals our government’s vicious mendacity in filling the pockets of real estate, construction, and hospitality interests under the absurd guise of showcasing Vancouver to the world. But the movie makes it clear that the insidious logic of this operation is that we have to ruin North America’s most livable city in order for it to have its dubious day in the sun.

Who would have guessed that the construction firms that lit up their cranes with YES 2010 signs didn’t have our best interests in mind? The ugly truth is that the construction and real estate tycoons care about Vancouverites about as much as Boeing and Halliburton care about the troops and taxpayers.

Conrad Schmidt, the Work Less Party’s mercurial trickster founder, really pounded the pavement to expose the fallout that Gordon and Larry Campbell, Sam Sullivan, and VANOC don’t want us to think about.

One of the highlights of the film is when Derrick Corrigan, Burnaby’s very articulate mayor and an outspoken opponent of the Olympics, laughs heartily at the oxymoronic notion of a “green Olympics.” Corrigan is quick to point out that there’s nothing green about an indiscriminate construction frenzy. The film does a great job of underscoring this assessment in its coverage of the Eagle Ridge Bluffs protests.

The Sea-to-Sky highway expansion project will put the highway right through the extremely sensitive ecosystems of Eagle Ridge Bluffs, Larson Creek Wetlands, and even the popular Baden Powell hiking trail. In response to this brazen abrogation of the government’s promise to “protect and enhance natural landscapes,” a brave coalition of disparate citizens—ranging from raging grannies to concerned scientists—went out there and not only protested the devastation but did everything they could to stop the tractors from violating the ecosystem.

And it’s not that these people are Luddites. Quite the contrary, in fact. Most of them are just regular folks who’ve had enough. They’ve been driven to direct action not by a particular hatred of modernity, but because there’s no reason to be plowing through these unique wetlands when the provincial government could build a tunnel under the area that would not encroach on this sensitive habitat. In fact, West Vancouver’s mayor and city council support this alternate plan, but all of the palms have been greased and Gordo’s happy to steamroll over anyone and anything that gets in the way of his highway. For more information go to Eagleridgebluffs.ca

Another compelling part of the movie focuses on the fearless antipoverty activists who are doing everything they can to publicize the next broken promise. Every level of government pledged that the Games would not adversely affect the homeless and disadvantaged. But it seems that our government, in concert with its buddies in real estate, is eager to have the old Hastings hotels ripped down in order to present a squeaky- clean image to the world during our 17 days in the sun.

The real estate moguls are racing to replace the welfare hotels, which house people that have nowhere else to go, with glossy new condo projects. Unfortunately, little is being done to provide the people who live in these hotels with alternate accommodations. So Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) activists took matters into their own hands and took over the boarded-up North Star Hotel. Then, from the top floor they unfurled a giant Homes Not Games banner. It was all over the news. But they didn’t stop there. A week later a handful of APC activists outsmarted the police (watch the film to find out how) and took over an empty building on Cambie Street. The city responded with an entire riot squad. But amazingly, even after getting beaten up by cops and arrested, the APC is as resolute as ever to stop the neoliberal feeding frenzy from displacing Vancouver’s poorest.

There’s another dimension to the hideous Yaletownification of Vancouver that the film astutely addresses. As Vancouver’s affordable housing is converted into condos and the cost of living in this already expensive city continues to rise, a gulf is opening up between the haves and the have-nots. And this is having all kinds of hitherto unthought of repercussions on Vancouver’s vitality.

Commercial Drive is arguably the crucible of this effect. The artists, activists, and eccentrics who have given this notorious neighbourhood its dynamism are slowly being crowded out by yuppie condo projects with laughable names like Dharma Digs, which is nothing if not a pathetic caricature of everything that’s made this neighbourhood what it is. As you listen to Conrad’s interviews with various community characters, you can almost feel the menacing gentrification noose tightening.

In the end, Five Ring Circus does what all good documentaries do. It arouses empathy and rouses the viewer to action. Conrad says that the last thing he wants is for his documentary to be a footnote to Vancouver’s epitaph, so he’s burning the midnight oil to get it out by February ’07.

All of this begs the question: what impact will the Olympics have on Vancouver? Homelessness is on the rise, green space is disappearing, our hospitals are in shambles as patients die in crowded waiting rooms, the cost of post-secondary education has doubled in the last four years and will continue to rise.

But at least the construction firms, hospitality industry, real estate barons, and ski resorts are happy. And the rest of us will have a new speed-skating oval, a convention center, and a bigger stretch of highway to make use of. Not to mention our blessed day in the sun.

Campbell’s war on Vancouver is intended to turn Canada’s pride and glory and North America’s most livable town into the quintessential American city, a bland, lifeless, paved-over gated community that only the privileged can afford to enjoy while poverty is criminalized.

Five Ring Circus is both a much-needed wake-up call and a call to arms. Rock on, Conrad!

danadleman@gmail.com

danadleman@gmail.com

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