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Olympics
Olympic organizers have brought this on themselves
Word of an internationally-recruited massing of protesters for 2010 changes the local dynamics completely
by Chris Shaw
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At some point, one has to go with what works or risk being irrelevant. This has never been more true than when trying to decide what it would take to keep the developers behind the Olympics from further trashing our communities and the environment.
For five years, the “No Games 2010” group and “2010 Watch” waged an educational struggle designed to reveal to both the public and the authorities what the Games would really do to our economy and environment. There were some successes: 36% of Vancouverites who bothered to vote in the Olympic referendum, voted “No.” We did embarrass VANOC from time to time, some “red pill” moments happened, and a number of people in the city, the province, and around the world are now seriously questioning the Olympics “frame.”
The latter might be the opposition’s singular success, in that many now realize that the IOC is not a charity but rather a marketeering giant pushing a product line of televised athletics along with designer junk destined for landfill. And VANOC is not a civic-minded group of citizens who love high performance sports, but rather developers hell-bent on leveraging tax dollars to morph Vancouver and BC into their corporate fantasy.
It doesn’t matter
These are some positive outcomes indeed, but in the end it doesn’t much matter since the Games preparations keep charging ahead, the poor keep getting shoved around, a hundred thousand trees—likely vastly more in the end—have been destroyed, wetlands and habitat have been pillaged, and the level of accountability by government and VANOC is firmly fixed at zero.
Even VANOC’s erstwhile watch poodle, the IOCC, has finally had enough and recently said so. Politely. But the reality remains that asking nicely, hitting them with facts and figures, going cup-in-hand to beg them to leave the environment and the homeless alone, has produced pretty much nothing in terms of positive results. Platitudes spew from Jack Poole’s and Sam Sullivan’s mouths, but it’s pretty obvious that they simply don’t care, never did, and never will.
The reason is simple: Other than the odd embarrassment and being forced to work a tad harder on brand marketing than they had hoped, the Olympic opposition is no real threat to them or their profits. They can also count on the fact that the mainstream media will never “out” either VANOC or the IOC. The unions have been rendered impotent by temporary construction jobs. And Concert Property’s exchange of spit with the union pension funds and the arts councils and many First Nations, all with payoffs in hand, ensures they will all remain firmly on side.
Nothing will stop them
In short, nothing on the horizon is really going to put a spoke in the wheels unless they really screw up and get themselves into a major scandal with somebody’s paws caught in the cookie jar. If all goes according to plan, the IOC “family” will come for the spectacle in 2010, grab their tax-free profits, hand the Olympic flag to the next suckers, and do-si-do out of here faster than you can sing “Furlong’s Privateers.”
It was all business as usual . . . until suddenly ”radicals” showed up outside the boardroom doors!
Yup, it’s the Anti-Poverty Committee, and they won’t play nice, they don’t play by the rules of a “civil” city, and lo and behold, the earth has tilted. Now the “far-left malcontents,” if not the blatant terrorists “holding BC hostage,” as the mainstream press call them, have the attention of the public: The Olympic’s role in adding to the plight of the poor has become the issue of the day. It gets worse. The rude little bastards who say naughty words and make threatening noises about evicting VANOC board members from their Shaughnessy homes are now talking about ramping up even further to organize a convergence of anti-globalization/anti-capitalist, and yes, anti-Olympic, activists from around the globe. Just as in the “battle of Seattle” or in Quebec City, the goal is to bring protestors from all over who will rock the city to its core and make the IOC wish they’d never heard of BC. The very notion of such a thing happening during the Olympics has to send shivers down the spines of the Olympic family, not to mention the Vancouver Board of Trade and the various government agencies now scrambling to come up with a workable security plan.
Hearts and minds
VANOC’s centre of gravity has always been their credibility with the public, and the last thing they want is to have events spin out of control on their watch. In turn, the IOC’s centre of gravity is the marketing of the Olympic brand, and major demonstrations during 2010 would not showcase the product line very well: clouds of tear gas caught on TV and national anthems drowned out by angry voices and police sirens don’t sell well.
Leaving aside the issue of whether APC and allied organizations could actually pull off something of this nature in the time remaining, the key question to ponder is this: Is it a good idea? The answer has to be weighted against the empirical reality that nothing else has worked. Faced with that inconvenient fact, the time is perhaps indeed ripe for a new experiment, one that would seek to drive out the IOC and VANOC completely. Cobble this to a boycott of local and international Olympic sponsors, and the plan starts to sound like it might have legs.
The choice
VANOC and the government may still get a choice, but they won’t much like it since it goes against all the things they wanted the Games to deliver. Nevertheless, here’s what’s on the table if they want the Olympic party to continue: No Downtown Eastside hotel closures, real efforts backed by significant dollars to fight poverty, a complete moratorium on further environmental destruction along with some new provincial parks added to replace wilderness already destroyed, and VANOC’s books completely open to the public. Oh, and by the way, Betty Krawcyzk out of jail too, and with financial compensation for time served.
No deal? Fine, they’ll see you in the streets and you’d better start adding zeros to your security costs. The APC has raised the stakes and prised open a debate that has been far too polite for much too long. It’s about time to give their ideas serious consideration.
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