Activists Set to Converge in Vancouver for Olympics
Protests will include “direct action” but no violence, says Games opponent
By Joan Delaney
Epoch Times Staff
 
An anti-Olympics slogan on a garage door in Calgary. (Jasper Seren)
 
Just as with other big events like G8 summits and WTO conferences, the
2010 Winter Olympics has become a rallying point for social activist
groups who are planning a five-day “convergence” in Vancouver for the
occasion.
 
The wide range of activists including anti-poverty, First Nations, labour,
environmental, and anti-war groups will gather to protest what they see as
the corporate greed of the Olympic movement as well as globalization and
capitalism.
 
Chris Shaw, a neurological researcher at the University of British
Columbia and a member of the Olympic Resistance Network (ORN), a coalition
of activist groups, has opposed the Games since Vancouver’s bid was in its
early stages.
 
A street medic who is a reservist with the Canadian Forces, Shaw is a
spokesman for the Olympics watchdog 2010watch.com and author of the 2008
book “Five Ring Circus: Myths and Realities of the Olympic Games.”
 
“The Olympics is one more aspect of multinational control where this
foreign entity comes into your town and starts telling you how to run your
life and making your government do it, and quite frankly a lot of people
don't appreciate that,” he says.
 
Critics claim the Olympics are largely a scheme to enrich developers while
threatening equality and justice by exacerbating poverty, curtailing civil
liberties, and driving up taxes. Activists are also protesting the fact
that the Games are being held on unceded land that rightly belongs to
local First Nations.
 
Shaw says if issues such as aboriginal treaties and poverty had been
addressed—“if we didn’t have 3,000 homeless living on our streets”—such a
broad range of groups likely wouldn’t be preparing to protest.
 
The extensive traffic restrictions alone, he says, will have a detrimental
effect on local businesses.
 
“We're looking at massive traffic closures and if you run a small business
you're just utterly screwed if you're not downtown. So no one can get to
you, no one can park in front of you, no one can even necessarily bike to
you. So a lot of businesses are going to take a massive hit.”
Millions in investments
 
Opponents argue the B.C. government shouldn’t be spending millions on the
Games, which begin on Feb. 12, while at the same time making significant
cutbacks on social spending. Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is the poorest
postal code in Canada, while British Columbia has the highest poverty rate
in the country.
 
But Olympics organizers say the sporting event will benefit the poor and
local businesses through redevelopment and other economic spinoffs.
 
“We're going to have the attention of the world here for this period of
time and I think it's forced Vancouver to look at itself critically,” says
Vancouver city councillor Geoff Meggs, a supporter of the Games.
 
Meggs says that although the “big corporate presence” that is part and
parcel of the Games has attracted some criticism, Vancouver stands to reap
a number of benefits.
 
These include an increase in tourism and a focus by Olympics organizer
VANOC on environmentalism and sustainability. There was also an effort to
lessen the social impact, he says.
 
Demonstrators protest outside City Hall in Chicago last September against
that city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. Chicago lost the bid to Rio de
Janeiro. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
“For the first time, the Games have had a commitment to try to minimize or
eliminate social impact. They haven't been as advanced as we had hoped,
but they certainly have produced millions of dollars of investments in the
Downtown Eastside and that kind of thing.
 
“We've made a lot of investments that probably would have been made at
some point but have been made quicker as a result [of the Games],” he
says.
 
Local aboriginals are co-hosting the event. According to VANOC, its
“historic protocol” to involve the First Nations in whose traditional
territories the Games are being held marks the first time an organizing
committee has entered into such a relationship with indigenous peoples.
 
Meggs points out that the involvement of Aboriginals in both the
construction of the venues and participation in the games has formed “a
lot of global network connections” they wouldn't otherwise have had.
 
But aboriginal involvement in the Games provides another opportunity, he
says.
 
“The prominence that the First Nations are playing in the games is an
important signal to us locally that we have to completely change our
relationship with First Nations and base it on reconciliation and
understanding, not on the kind of colonial arrangement that has prevailed
up ‘til now.”
No violence?
 
Convergences have been the main tactic for protesting globalization since
November 1999 when about 40,000 demonstrators gathered in Seattle and were
successful in delaying the opening of the World Trade Organization
Ministerial Conference.
 
But such convergences have seen flagging support in recent years, some say
because of heightened security since 9/11, and activists see the Vancouver
Games as a chance to breathe new life into the anti-globalization
movement.
 
Shaw draws a parallel between globalization and the Olympics.
 
“Olympic organizers and the government have a different agenda ... They're
a special group, special people who get special stuff, and the rest of us
get to pay for it, and that has really kindled the Olympic resistance, and
the Olympic resistance is now linking itself up theoretically and
practically with kind of a resurgence of the anti-globalization movement;
people see the connections very clearly.”
 
He says he doesn’t know how many are expected to show up for the
convergence, which includes a “Conference and People’s Summit,” a public
march, a festival at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and two “autonomous days
of action,” according to the Mostly Water website.
 
Although there will be “direct action” such as sitting in the streets and
attempting to raise banners inside venues, Shaw says violence is not on
the protesters’ agenda.
 
However, the police have cited the possibility of violence as part of the
reason the security budget for the Games has reached a whopping $900
million.
 
Shaw says the activist groups involved hope the police “will not
over-react and turn it into a Donnybrook” as happened at the so-called
Battle in Seattle in 1999, when demonstrations that began peacefully
escalated into a full-scale riot that pitted protesters against the
Seattle Police Department and the National Guard.
 
“What happens here on the streets is entirely in the hands of the police,”
Shaw says. “They can decide to be calm and deal with issues as they arise
in a calm, rational manner and not over-react, or they can decide to be in
default to their more law-enforcement side and decide to make it an issue
which frankly I think would be a horrible mistake.
 
“If they're focusing more on demonstrations which are not going to hurt
anybody but might be politically embarrassing, then they are missing the
boat on people who really want to do harm.”
 

Joan Delaney Epoch Times Staff