Chris Shaw, author of a book which criticizes the legacy of the Olympic Games, says Vancouver stands to be “horribly humilated” on the world stage in 2010.

Credit: Doug Shanks

Beijing intensifies local focus on 2010 Games

As the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games wind down to their final days, highly noted moments of disastrous PR remain burned into the public consciousness. Premier Gordon Campbell getting raked over the coals while international reporters questioned him about the Downtown Eastside, and the digitally-enhanced fakery of the opening ceremonies, stand out as particularly memorable moments, highlighting the darker side of the Olympics that critics have been talking about for years.

Meanwhile, here in Vancouver, community advocates continue to push for greater public awareness of the potential social impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics. The results of a recent survey conducted by the Impact on Communities Coalition (IOCC) show their work is raising some inconvenient truths.

The survey, conducted by telephone polls during two weeks in July, was compiled from interviews with 501 randomly selected Vancouver residents speaking English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. The results show that 71.6 per cent of survey participants support increased low-income tenancy protection from eviction in the years leading up to the Vancouver 2010 Games.

“These numbers verify the sense that governments are responding very late [to Vancouver’s housing crisis],” says IOCC board member Am Johal. “I think that this is going to be a highlight going into the civic election and the provincial election. If critical parties and governments don’t move quickly, they will pay a price at the polls in November.”

Johal adds that “this issue’s not going to go away,” particularly in the politicized atmosphere leading up to the Vancouver municipal election. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Johal’s work, however, is that he sees history repeating itself again and again. “It happens virtually every single time,” he says of the displacement and marginalization of poor communities that seems to occur in every Olympic host city. “And it’s not as if [Vancouver] didn’t know about it. We’ve been raising this since about 2001, early on in the bid process. We were painfully aware of [the mass evictions] that happened [prior to] Expo ’86.”

Olympic critic and Work Less Party city council candidate Chris Shaw comes down hard on the IOCC’s work in his widely noted book, Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games, published this year. Shaw criticizes the IOCC for not doing enough to hold Olympic organizers accountable for their actions, but he sees the survey as a positive step in a direction he hoped the IOCC could have taken earlier. As for Olympic legacies, Shaw foresees a dark one in Vancouver’s future. “The legacy is going to be that Vancouver will be horribly humiliated in the eyes of the world for being one of the richest cities in Canada and having this ghastly homeless problem,” he says. “We have built the economy of this province on one product, which is endless housing, and it’s simply not affordable for most people. [It’s] a gentrified city — what they so proudly call a world-class city — that basically consists of a bunch of rich people and a whole bag of poor people and not much in-between.”

Shaw likens the roll-out of the 2010 Winter Olympics to bad parenting. “As a parent, I wouldn’t go out drinking every night and party with my buddies. You would take my kids away, and you would be right to,” he says. “How can you honestly, as a society, look at 3,000 homeless people and think a party’s more important? It’s criminal, and as appallingly irresponsible as anything I can imagine.”

That the IOCC survey shows popular interest in protecting low-income renters in the years leading up to 2010 suggests that the Olympic wool pulled over people’s eyes is slowly coming undone. “For me, [the survey shows that] there’s widespread support [for increased rental protection] across the city, across all parts of the city. It’s a significant finding,” says Johal.

As for moving forward with solutions, Shaw would like to see Olympic and government officials take public responsibility for their actions. “The way to deal with this is to accept that there is a [housing] problem and come up with real solutions to it, not try to bandage it, hide it and pretend you don’t have it,” he says. “This is really not rocket science.”