Olympic critic Chris Shaw has helped launch a lawsuit against the City of Vancouver.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: Critics slam Olympic bylaws

Last week, while Premier Gordon Campbell showed off a pair of Olympic mittens on U.S. television as part of promoting the 2010 Games during a visit to New York City, MLAs in Victoria were debating Olympic-related civil liberties issues. The debate focused on a second reading of Bill 13, an omnibus bill containing a controversial act critics say restricts Charter rights to free speech during Games time.

The Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act, which gives the municipalities of Vancouver, Richmond, and Whistler temporary enforcement power to remove unwanted signs and graffiti during the Games, was introduced earlier this month, and garnered criticism from civil liberties groups and Olympic critics.

The Act gives Olympic security officers the right to enter private residences with 24 hours’ notice to remove or cover up signs that the City of Vancouver classifies as “ambush marketing and graffiti.” Under current provisions of the Vancouver Charter, it would take the City 30 days or more to remove such signage, but the new Act would allow the City to stop the unauthorized distribution of flyers and display of commercial signs immediately. While the City distributed a media release on October 20 stating that “there is a misperception that free speech during the Olympics is at risk” and that the City is “not focused on anti-Olympic signs,” Olympic critics Chris Shaw and Alissa Westergard-Thorpe will continue with their lawsuit against the City of Vancouver for infringing on Charter rights to free speech, which they launched with the BC Civil Liberties Association earlier this month.

“We’re not going to back down,” Shaw told WE. “I am going to take a very hard-line view that I’m not going to negotiate Charter rights with any government entity. It’s non-negotiable. They can withdraw it or they can face us in court.”

Shaw hopes the lawsuit will force the City to back down or withdraw what he says are “egregious” Charter of Rights infringements. “I think the implications of having a bylaw — or Bill 13 — that essentially strips away, in principle, civil rights, is a very, very damaging piece of legislation to have on the books,” he says, “and I can’t imagine that that sort of legislation would not be abused in the future by other cities, maybe even by Vancouver.”

Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert was one of the five opposition MLAs who raised concerns about the Municipalities Enabling and Validating Act in the legislature on October 20. “The thing about Bill 13 is it’s kind of a miscellaneous grab-bag... But then you dig through the bill and you find the provisions related to the sign bylaw,” he told WE after the session. “You’d think something like that would come to more substantive debate through the introduction of its own individual bill, but I can understand the government does not want to highlight this and does not want this to become an issue. They’d prefer people didn’t know it was happening.”

Herbert says the bill should have been addressed earlier. “I think the international community would have supported that, as they were sold on a vision of a sustainable and socially just Games,” he says, “but when they come to B.C. and Canada, I don’t think that’s what they’re going to get.”