03) VANCOUVER BECOMING MILITARY CAMP FOR OLYMPICS

(The following article is from the June 1-15, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Kimball Cariou

When Vancouver voters backed the city's 2010 Winter Olympics bid by an underwhelming 63% majority, they were promised the Games would bring social housing, new recreation and transit facilities, and a party that would bring the world to our doors. Five years later, the social housing has been scaled way back, skewed transit "improvements" are costing taxpayers some $3 billion, and preparations are underway to turn the city into an occupied military camp. "Security costs" are expected to balloon past the one billion dollar mark.

     The latter issue is in the headlines, after the Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee (VANOC) offered over $300,000 to the Britannia Community Centre to use its skating rink as an Olympic hockey practice venue. Since the east Vancouver neighbourhood voted against the Olympic bid, many residents who were already highly skeptical of the Games "benefits" now have new fears.

     Britannia's Board will vote on the controversial offer in June, but most residents expressed vocal opposition at a recent forum. Among the sharpest concerns is that police and military will put up barriers around the Community Centre to block protests. Since the complex includes the local library, a major swimming pool and other recreation facilities, and both an elementary and a secondary school, residents could be cut off from these important community resources for weeks or even months.

    Those who scoff at this scenario should look at the Trout Lake Community Centre, just 20 blocks south, where the ice rink was slated for replacement. In 2004 VANOC offered $2.5 million (half the estimated cost) towards the replacement in exchange for its use as a practice venue before and during the Games. Since entering into this agreement, the project cost has more than tripled to $15.9 million. VANOC refuses to provide any additional funding, despite the inflationary construction market the Olympics have helped create. Trout Lake is responsible for the extra costs. Trout Lake has also learned that it may be surrounded by a "security perimeter", which could force cancellation of all programming in the fall of 2009 and winter 2010.
   Another concern is a huge influx of police and soldiers into the neighbourhood. Already, indigenous and Latino youth in the area are subject to constant police harassment and racialization, and many predict that racist attacks will increase around the Games.

     The neighbourhood's worries are heightened by a spate of news reports, such as a May 20 Canwest News Service story which said, "Canadian security agencies are planning to use planes, tanks, ships, and thousands of military and police personnel to secure the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games and will consider their job a success if the public hardly notices their presence."

     The overall plan was initiated by none other than Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier, the driving force behind the Canadian Armed Forces combat mission in Afghanistan, who wrote a June 2006 document authorizing the military to assist the RCMP's Olympic plans. Military planners say it will be the largest security operation in Canadian history. Their boast that Canadians "will hardly notice" the operation is an attempt to reassure the public at a time when opposition to the Olympics is becoming more organized. Nearly 13,000 RCMP, military and other security personnel will be stationed to Vancouver, a force which will inevitably be highly visible.

     The security plans are also highly intrusive, including hundreds of closed-circuit cameras, electronic sensors, and unmanned aerial vehicles, leading sociologist David Lyon of Queen's University to call Vancouver 2010 "the Surveillance Games." Each Olympic venue will use face-recognition technology to track people on the streets.

     B.C. privacy commissioner David Loukadelis has been told the images from those cameras will be available only to "key people." But he fears the cameras might remain after the Games, infringing on privacy rights, as happened in Sydney and Atlanta.

     "Forces and other dangerous individuals or organizations may seize this moment to further their aims using violence," Hillier wrote in his 2006 document. "Canadian security forces, and the CF, must therefore be poised to detect, deter, prevent, pre-empt and defeat threats and aggression during the period of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics while respecting, as much as possible, the spirit of the Olympic Truce."

     In another chilling memo, Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais wrote in October 2006 that "There are a number of terrorist groups that maintain a presence within Canada. While much of their activity is related to fundraising, some of these groups are assessed as having the capacity to undertake terrorist acts."

    David Pugliese wrote in the Ottawa Citizen (May 10) that the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) will be deeply involved in the 2010 Olympics "with potentially everything from fighter aircraft to sophisticated surveillance planes."
     NORAD has been given the job of providing air protection (from what threat is unclear) and monitoring the airspace over the Olympics, with the full capabilities of the US-dominated military body to draw upon.

    At this point, Pugliese says, the military's Joint Task Force Games headquarters in Victoria has around 25 personnel, expanding to over 200 by 2010. Already, Canadian navy divers are mapping out the seafloor of the Vancouver harbour, and Aurora patrol aircraft are flying missions to collect images of various areas.

     These scare tactics recall the situation in Vancouver a decade ago. During the 1997 APEC Summit, police used pepper spray, kilometers of fences and other security tools to block and attack protesters. Their justification at the time was similar - the potential for terrorist attacks, for which they claimed undisclosed evidence. It later turned out that police agencies tried to infiltrate anti-APEC protest groups, and that their "evidence" of the threat of violence consisted of a single blasting cap found lying on the ground under the Arthur Laing Bridge near the airport.

     In actual fact, much of the current opposition to the 2010 Games is emerging from two sources: poor people and the Aboriginal community.

     Anti-poverty organizations have been consistent opponents of the Olympic bid. Since the bid was launched, homelessness in the Vancouver region has jumped from several hundred to nearly 2,000. Promises to build new social housing as part of the bid have been dramatically reduced, even as hundreds of single-room occupancy housing units are closed in the Downtown Eastside. Developers and landlords are licking their chops in anticipation of even steeper increases in the value of properties in this neighbourhood. Rents and housing purchase costs alike are skyrocketing across the Lower Mainland, as predicted by anti-poverty groups from the start.

     Despite some minor announcements from the provincial Liberal government (such as the purchase of a number of Downtown Eastside hotels), the housing crisis has become much worse. Poor people are outraged that billions of dollars are being poured into the Olympics instead of homes. It's a recipe for larger and angrier protests. And given the history of police violence against anti-poverty movements in Vancouver, the winter of 2010 may well see escalating attacks against demonstrators.

     The second main issue raised by anti-Olympic forces is that the Games facilities and other recreation and tourism facilities are being developed on "stolen Native land" - unceded First Nations territories. Several band councils have become official "Olympic partners," but these bodies remain contentious within the grassroots Native population, most of whom were not consulted about the process.

     In spite of enormous pressures to "grab a piece of the Olympic pie," many traditionalist and grassroots Aboriginal people refuse to join the celebration. One of these was the late Harriet Nahanee, a long-time activist who died after being jailed for her role in resisting the expansion of the highway to Whistler through forests north of Vancouver. On several occasions, prominent chiefs have been presented with bags of apples by indigenous activists, signifying contempt for those who collaborate with VANOC.

     Aligned with these groups are various environmentalist and left political forces, composing a wide-ranging, loose coalition of those who consider the Olympics one of the causes of the deteriorating economic and political situation for working people, the poor, and Aboriginal peoples in British Columbia.

     The Olympic Countdown Clock in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery now shows about 600 days left before the 2010 Winter Games begin. Tensions will continue to mount as the city is increasingly turned into a war zone. The eyes of the world will be on Vancouver and Whistler in just twenty months, but the sight may not be a pretty one.

     (Cariou is the organizer of the Vancouver East Club of the Communist Party of Canada.)

sitemap